Step Inside This 'Dreamworld' Exhibition To Celebrate 100 Years of Surrealism

Surrealism is so much more than just an art movement. It's on runways, album covers, embedded in architecture, interior design and even hiding in the everyday. Salvador Dalí's melting clocks and René Magritte's faceless apple man ("The Son of Man") have fully crossed over from museum walls to pop culture, reappearing as clothing graphics, novelty accessories and, in Dalí's case, into real clocks that look straight out of a dream sequence.

But a century ago, it was just a niche group of artists. In 1924, poet and artist André Breton dropped the Manifesto of Surrealism, declaring a "crisis of consciousness," his way of diagnosing how adulthood drains us of imagination and replaces instinct with etiquette. His solution? Surrealism as a rebellion against all that rigidity, a return to wonder, intuition and unapologetic strangeness. Put simply, he wanted the world to stop playing it safe.

Fast-forward 100 years, and surrealism's rebellious spark gets a museum-scale spotlight at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PhAM) with Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, fresh from its European tour. Bringing together nearly 200 works by more than 70 artists, the exhibition traces how the movement has shapeshifted, challenged and expanded, all while keeping its core devotion to the subconscious.

 

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Curated by Matthew Affron and Danielle Cooke, the exhibition unfolds chronologically across six thematic chapters. Visitors can wander through its earliest experiments, unpack the movement's relationship with nature and see how global conflict fueled darker turns in the surrealist expression. A standout is "Exiles," a section unique to the PhAM presentation, spotlighting European artists who fled to North America during the Second World War and reshaped the movement from abroad. The journey ends with "Magic Art," the movement's turn toward mysticism and esoterica.

Anchored by works from René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso and Mark Rothko, Dreamworld offers both a sweeping survey and a speculative look at what happens when artists abandon logic for possibility. The takeaway? The human imagination can rewrite rules entirely.

The exhibition is now on view until February 16, 2026. Head to the PhAM website for more details.

In other news, check out this exhibition exploring Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo in parallel.

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