Masters of Surrealism

This summer, MARUANI MERCIER’s annual homage to the icons of modern art turns its lens to Surrealism, not as a single vision, but as a shifting terrain shaped by artists like Paul Delvaux, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Francis Picabia, Yves Tanguy, and Man Ray, each of whom made the movement unmistakably their own. Far from a fixed style, Surrealism emerged as a field of tension between collective ideals and radical individuality. Rooted in dreams, desire, and psychic liberation, and rising from the ashes of Dada, its influence has long outlasted the conditions that gave rise to it.

 

Officially inaugurated with André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, the movement sought to free thought from the shackles of reason and morality. Inspired by Freud and Marx, its adherents, poets, philosophers, and painters, ventured into the irrational, the erotic, and the fantastic. Together, these visual artists forged a shared language of dreamscapes, unconscious impulses, and uncanny juxtapositions, each in radically individual terms.

 

At the heart of Masters of Surrealism are these eight artists who, each in their own way, laid claim to the movement. While their approaches diverged, they were united by a common ambition: to transcend logic and convention through personal vocabularies of illusion, metaphor, and transformation.

 

The exhibition underscores how each artist staked out a personal domain within Surrealism. In 1936, Dalí famously declared with characteristic bravado, “Le surréalisme, c’est moi,” claiming the movement as an extension of his own psyche and imagination. While his version was certainly the most theatrical, the same fiercely personal approach drove Magritte’s quiet subversions, Ernst’s technical innovations, Picabia’s irreverence, and Miró’s lyrical abstraction. Surrealism, in their hands, became a plural project, shaped not by a single vision, but by a chorus of inner worlds. Each of these artists, in turn, was Surrealism.

 

Their methods reveal just how distinct those worlds were. Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method was both admired and controversial. Magritte challenged perception with poetic clarity and conceptual wit. Tanguy conjured biomorphic landscapes of eerie, suspended stillness. Ernst invented automatic techniques such as frottage to probe the unconscious. Picabia remained a defiant presence, shifting fluidly between abstraction, figuration, and satire. Delvaux created hushed, theatrical scenes peopled by classical architecture and enigmatic female figures. Man Ray, working between photography, sculpture, and film, fused Surrealism with the experimental spirit of Dada and the sleekness of modern design. Miró, meanwhile, wove dreamlike symbols and floating forms into an abstract vocabulary that blended spontaneity with precision.