Art History · 2 min read

Surrealism Began With a Manifesto: The 1924 Idea Behind Dream Paintings

October 2025

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Melting clocks and floating rocks came later. Surrealism started with words: on 15 October 1924, the poet André Breton published his Manifesto of Surrealism in Paris.¹ Its big idea still shapes how we picture dreams.

A manifesto, not a style

The word itself was older: the poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined it in 1917. Breton gave it a definition: “pure psychic automatism.”² Many surrealists used automatic writing and drawing to unlock ideas and images from the unconscious mind; others set out to paint dream worlds.²

Surrealism grew out of Dada and flourished in Europe between the two World Wars. Its members reacted against the “rationalism” they blamed for the horrors of the First World War. Drawing on Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the source of imagination.³

“An absolute reality, a surreality.”
André Breton, on joining dream and waking life, quoted by Encyclopaedia Britannica

Dreams had painters long before 1924

Surrealist painting looked back to the fantastic and grotesque images of earlier artists like Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya, and to closer figures such as Odilon Redon, Giorgio de Chirico and Marc Chagall.³

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych crowded with fantastic figures, creatures and structures — Hieronymus Bosch, *The Garden of Earthly Delights*. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1799, a man asleep at a desk while owls and bats swarm behind him — Goya, *The sleep of reason produces monsters*, plate 43 of *Los Caprichos*, 1799, etching and aquatint. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of M. Knoedler & Co., 1918. Public domain.

Odilon Redon, Day, from the series Dreams, 1891, a black-and-white lithograph — Odilon Redon, *Day*, from the series *Dreams* (*Songes*), 1891, lithograph. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1920. Public domain.

Goya's famous print, made in 1799, shows what happens when reason is absent: owls and bats rise over the sleeping artist.⁴ A century later, Redon filled charcoal drawings and lithographs with dreams. He called them his “noirs.”⁵

Two ways to paint a dream

Britannica describes two poles. At one, artists such as Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson and Joan Miró made suggestive, often organic shapes that set the viewer's own associations free.³

At the other, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí and Paul Delvaux painted recognizable things with great realism, then placed them where they make no rational sense, like Magritte's ordinary slice of ham with a human eye staring from its center.³ That second approach is the one most people mean today when they say “surreal.”

It belongs to the larger story of modern art, which by then had already produced the first abstract paintings.

Casopra canvas Skybound Book above a velvet armchair in a quiet reading corner — In the photo: Skybound Book, a Casopra canvas.

A dream on the wall

Surreal images work best where the mind is allowed to wander: a reading corner, a bedroom, a quiet study.

Keep the rest of the room simple and calm. The strangeness of the picture does the talking.

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Waking dreams

Four dreamlike canvases where the impossible looks real.

Golden Fog Gateway

Moonbound Oak

Calm Constellation III

Cloudbound Heel

See all surrealism

Back to La Maison Casopra

A manifesto, not a style

Dreams had painters long before 1924

Two ways to paint a dream

A dream on the wall

Waking dreams

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