June 24, 2025 – The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) presents Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, a major exhibition celebrating the centenary of the Surrealist movement, on view from November 8, 2025, to February 16, 2026. As the final stop in an ambitious tour organized with the Centre Pompidou in Paris—and the sole venue for this exhibition in the United States—the PMA will tell the story of Surrealist art, spotlighting the makers who sought out new expressive forms to expand the reach of the creative imagination.
The five touring partners are: the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (Brussels), the Fundación MAPFRE (Madrid), the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), and the PMA. Each venue was tasked with presenting a distinct story about Surrealism relevant to its own history and collection. At the PMA, Dreamworld will provide a chronological installation arranged through six thematic sections, including one, unique to Philadelphia, that focuses on artists who fled from Europe to Mexico and the U.S. during World War II.
In his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, poet and artist André Breton addressed what he saw as a crisis of consciousness: at around twenty years of age, he said, humans discard their childlike imaginations to adopt adult sense, decorum, and judgement. Breton believed that in order to obtain a state of freedom, all people needed instead to reharness the imagination. Surrealism, the movement in literature and art that Breton codified with his manifesto, would continually seek new techniques for exploring the human capacity for creativity and astonishment.
The first self-described Surrealists working in Paris rejected the representation of objective reality in art as antithetical to a truer, higher beauty, and instead sought to produce images with a dreamlike character. The first section of this exhibition, “Waking Dream,” will trace the development in the 1920s of Surrealist imagery and experimental techniques across mediums, from the found-object constructions of Man Ray and the collages of Max Ernst to hallucinatory canvases by Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalí.
Dreamworld will then journey through sections exploring the themes of “Natural History” and “Desire.” Capturing a sense of wonder in nature was crucial for the development of Surrealist sensibility. Visitors will encounter enigmatic landscapes and fantastic creatures; torn-paper collages by Hans Arp will be displayed alongside Paul Klee’s vibrant painting Fish Magic (1925), the disorienting photographic landscapes of Lee Miller, and Joseph Cornell’s boxes containing found objects. Nearby, works by Hans Bellmer, Claude Cahun, André Kertész, and others will demonstrate the powerful ways in which photography served the Surrealist interest in eros, or desire, and the reinvention of the erotic body.
A through line of the exhibition will be the use of mythology to convey the Surrealist world view. A section titled “Premonition of War” will feature images of monsters and creatures of strange and terrifying shape, which artists such as Dalí, Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso used to respond to the devastating rise of totalitarianism and war in Europe in the 1930s.
With the outbreak of World War II, many Surrealists working in France left for North America, taking refuge in Caribbean ports, Mexico, and the United States. This will be the focus of a section, unique to the PMA, entitled “Exiles.” This part of the exhibition will feature treasured paintings in the PMA’s collection in addition to major loans such as Frida Kahlo's My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree) (1936). In New York, Surrealism’s wartime capital, younger artists developed innovative forms of painting in tune with Surrealist methods. Highlights here will include Jackson Pollock’s Male and Female (1942–1943) and Mark Rothko’s Gyrations on Four Planes (1944).
The exhibition’s concluding section, “Magic Art,” will focus on a new type of esotericism that emerged within Surrealism in the aftermath of World War II. Filled with imagery of magical and alchemical beings, celestial figures, and symbols of the occult, this section will feature Leonora Carrington’s The Pleasures of Dagobert (1945), which materializes the magical, metamorphic imaginings of an early-medieval French monarch, and Remedios Varo’s Creation of the Birds (1957), in which an owl-headed painter uses starlight to bring a painted bird to life.
“Surrealist art has been a focus of our museum since receiving the generous gifts of the Louise and Walter Arensberg collection in 1950 and the bequest of the Albert E. Gallatin collection in 1952,” said Matthew Affron, the museum’s Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art. “Today, our permanent collection features outstanding works by a range of artists associated with Surrealism, including Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, René Magritte, Jean Arp, Salvador Dalí, and Dorothea Tanning. As the main repository of works by Marcel Duchamp, one of Surrealism’s most influential guiding spirits, the PMA is very proud to mount this monumental exhibition and present it to audiences in the U.S.”
“The PMA has an extraordinary collection of modern art, and through this exhibition, we can offer our visitors a new perspective on Surrealism and showcase the strength of our own collection,” said Sasha Suda, the George D. Widener Director and CEO. “I can’t think of a more perfect way to celebrate 100 years of Surrealism.”
In Philadelphia, Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100 is curated by Matthew Affron, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art, with Danielle Cooke, Exhibition Assistant. It will be accompanied by an illustrated publication by Affron, detailing the key motivations, principles, themes, and techniques of Surrealist art from the early 1920s to the late 1950s.
