Room 205.13

With the publication in 1924 of the first Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton defined the movement’s basic principles, largely theorised from his own psychology. These principles included the importance of writing as the main vehicle in the artist’s psyche, automatic writing and an idealism that praised absolute values such as the imagination, beauty, profoundness and love. The dissemination of the movement and its ideological and artistic development, proposals and debates were expressed in an array of magazines which were, according to Breton, “a means of contact catering to the different and changing expectations of a corresponding, undefined audience. They give us a respiratory rhythm adapted, at the same time, to our vital needs and to the nature of ambient air”. Magazines were also a dialectic battlefield that staged creative and ideological differences among the different currents in the group.  

The works in this room are organised around one of Breton’s core texts, Le surréalisme et la peinture (Surrealism and Painting), first published in 1928, which assembled the work of artists who created a mode of painting adapted to Surrealist literary production. Automatic techniques and a focus on the inner reality of the artist aimed to bring about a crisis in bourgeois consciousness, in such a way that, ultimately, the works were conceived, as a whole, as a resource which advocated the revolution.