Dada and Surrealism: chance, dream and the unconscious

Cubism broke the object. Dada broke the frame. Confronted with a work from between the wars that is not obviously a painting — a urinal, a fur teacup, a collage of tram tickets, a photographic montage of politicians and machine parts — you are almost certainly looking at Dada or its inheritance. And when the strangeness returns to the canvas, painted with a jeweller’s precision, you have crossed into Surrealism.

The two are family. Surrealism absorbed most of the Paris Dadaists in 1924 and kept their techniques. But their purposes are opposite: Dada is destructive and public, aimed at a civilisation it holds in contempt; Surrealism is constructive and inward, aimed at a region of the mind it believes has been suppressed.

Dada, 1916–24: art against art

In February 1916 Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings opened a nightclub in Zurich, the Cabaret Voltaire, in a neutral city crowded with deserters, exiles and revolutionaries. Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck and Marcel Janco joined; the evenings featured sound poems, simultaneous recitations in three languages, cardboard costumes and abuse. The name Dada was, by most accounts, chosen at random from a dictionary — a baby’s first syllable, a hobby horse in French, a fitting nothing.

The logic of anti-art is worth stating properly, because it is not mere provocation. If European reason, taste, patriotism and connoisseurship had produced the Somme, then those things were bankrupt, and an art that served them was complicit. The target is therefore not a rival style but the institution: skill, permanence, seriousness, the gallery, the signature.

Three characteristic strategies follow.

The readymade. Marcel Duchamp took a bicycle wheel and mounted it on a stool (1913), bought a bottle rack (1914) and a snow shovel (1915), and in 1917 submitted a porcelain urinal, signed R. Mutt and titled Fountain, to a New York exhibition that had promised to accept everything. It was refused. The readymade replaces making with choosing, and Duchamp insisted the objects be visually indifferent — neither beautiful nor ugly — so that no aesthetic decision crept back in.

Chance. Arp tore up coloured paper, dropped it, and fixed it roughly where it landed: Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance (1916–17). Tzara proposed writing a poem by cutting a newspaper article into individual words and shaking them in a bag. The point is to evict the artist’s taste from the work.

Photomontage. Dada in Berlin was violently political, and the medium it invented was the cut-up photograph. Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919) assembles ball bearings, dancers, generals and the heads of the new republic’s politicians into a satirical whirlpool. Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz and John Heartfield — who anglicised his name in protest at German nationalism and would later aim the technique at Hitler — worked the same seam.

Around the edges: Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, building collages he called Merz (a syllable cut out of Kommerzbank) from bus tickets, sweet wrappers and gutter debris, and eventually accreting his house into the Merzbau. Francis Picabia drawing mock-technical machine diagrams with absurd captions. Man Ray making rayographs by laying objects straight onto photographic paper, and Cadeau (1921), a flat iron with tacks glued along its sole.

The look of Dada, then: it is often not a painting; it is an object, a collage, a montage, a poster. Typography runs in several directions and several typefaces at once. Materials are cheap and found. The titles are jokes, and usually dark ones.

Surrealism, 1924 onwards: the unconscious as subject

André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (Paris, 1924) took over where Paris Dada was exhausting itself. Breton defined Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism”: the attempt to express the real functioning of thought, free of reason, taste and moral control. Apollinaire had coined the adjective in 1917, but the movement dates from the manifesto.

Its intellectual engine is Freud. The unconscious is the true seat of thought; it surfaces in dreams, slips and free association; and the mechanisms of dream-work — displacement, condensation, the charge of the repressed — become artistic procedures. Breton, who had worked with shell-shocked soldiers during the war, had seen those mechanisms operating at close range. A second touchstone is a line from Lautréamont praising the beauty of the chance meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella: the incongruous encounter as a recipe.

The immediate visual ancestor is Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical painting of about 1910–19 — empty arcaded piazzas, long raking shadows in late-afternoon light, impossible converging perspectives, a distant train, a tailor’s mannequin. The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) is the type. The vocabulary of Surrealist unease is almost entirely his.

Strand one: the dream-realists

This is the strand most people mean by “Surrealist”. It paints impossible things with the meticulous technique of nineteenth-century academic illusionism, on the principle that a dream feels utterly convincing while you are inside it.

Salvador Dalí called his procedure the paranoiac-critical method — courting a delirium in which one thing is read as another, then recording the result with a miniaturist’s brush. The identifiers: an empty sunlit plain running back to a hard horizon under a cloudless blue sky (the Catalan coast at Cadaqués), objects that melt, sag, sprout, swarm with ants or are held up on crutches, hot ochre and flesh tones, glassy modelling and deep aerial perspective, and several disturbances happening at once. The Persistence of Memory (1931) and The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937).

René Magritte is the opposite in every technical respect. He trained in commercial art and paints like a poster designer: flat, matt, evenly lit, skies unmodelled, no virtuoso display anywhere. Nothing deforms. Objects stay solid, whole and ordinary — a bowler hat, an apple, a pipe, a curtain, a sash window — and the strangeness is entirely conceptual, usually a single impossible substitution, scale change or juxtaposition in an otherwise unremarkable bourgeois scene. The Treachery of Images (1929) with its painted pipe and its caption denying that it is one, Time Transfixed (1938) with a locomotive emerging from a fireplace, The Empire of Light with a night street under a daylight sky.

Yves Tanguy is the purest case, because he borrows nothing: a seamless grey-green plain fading into a gradient sky, scattered with small, precisely modelled bone-like or fungal objects casting long shadows. Nothing is recognisable at all. Paul Delvaux supplies sleepwalking nudes among classical colonnades and night trains.

Strand two: the automatists and biomorphs

Here the hand, or the material, generates the form, and the artist works out afterwards what it might be.

Joan Miró’s dream paintings from about 1925 give you a thinly washed blue or brown ground, a floating black line, small flat patches of pure red, yellow and green, and amoebic personages with one eye and a spike. The Birth of the World (1925) is nearly all stain; Harlequin’s Carnival (1924–25) teems. The mood is weightless and playful, not nightmarish.

André Masson made automatic drawings at speed, then transferred the idea to canvas by pouring glue and throwing sand at it, reading battles, fish and massacres out of the result.

Max Ernst invented the largest set of procedures. Frottage — laying paper over grained floorboards, leaves or sacking and rubbing with a pencil, as in the Histoire Naturelle portfolio (1926). Grattage — scraping oil paint over a textured object beneath the canvas. Decalcomania — pressing paint between surfaces and pulling them apart. He also made collage novels out of Victorian steel engravings, such as Une Semaine de Bonté (1934). His petrified forests and bird-creature Loplop come out of these textures.

The automatist strand matters beyond Surrealism: through Masson, Miró and Ernst, all of whom were in New York during the war, it feeds directly into Abstract Expressionism.

Magritte or Dalí, across a room

The traps

De Chirico is not a Surrealist. He supplied the imagery and predates the movement by a decade. Breton disowned his conservative post-1919 work, and de Chirico, with some justice, retaliated by producing backdated copies of his own early pictures.

Dreamlike is not Surrealist. Chagall’s floating lovers, Henri Rousseau’s jungles and Bosch’s hells all predate 1924 or sit outside the movement. Surrealism is a specific programme with a membership, a magazine and a leader who expelled people.

A readymade is not a Surrealist object. Duchamp’s bottle rack is chosen for indifference; Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup (Object, 1936) and Dalí’s Lobster Telephone (1936) are chosen for their charge.

Ernst straddles both strands, and so, intermittently, does Picasso — whose biomorphic distortions of the 1930s are Surrealist-adjacent although he never joined.

The word outlived the movement. “Surreal” in ordinary English now means merely odd. In a quiz it means Paris, 1924, and Breton.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Is it a painting at all? An object, a montage, a poster or a pile of found material points to Dada first.
2. Is the joke aimed at art itself? Uselessness, mock-technical diagrams, mixed typography, deliberate lack of skill — Dada, 1916–24.
3. Is it cut from photographs and political? Berlin Dada, around 1919–20 — Höch, Hausmann, Heartfield.
4. If it is a painting, is it painted well on purpose? Meticulous illusionism in the service of an impossibility means the dream-realist strand.
5. Does anything deform, melt or sprout? Dalí. Does everything stay solid but wrongly placed? Magritte.
6. Check the paint quality. Glossy and modelled with a deep golden landscape — Dalí. Flat, matt, cool and stage-like — Magritte.
7. Is nothing in it identifiable, on a grey-green plain? Tanguy.
8. Is the surface itself doing the work — rubbed grain, scraped texture, poured glue and sand? The automatist strand: Ernst or Masson.
9. Floating black line, washed ground, small bright shapes, one-eyed creatures? Miró.
10. Check the date against the vocabulary. Empty piazzas and mannequins before 1920 are de Chirico, the ancestor. After 1924 with a membership card, it is Surrealism proper.