The formal language of Surrealism has long since found its way into everyday life via fashion, advertising, and the media. Today the term Surrealism is haphazardly used to combine everything that appears magical, dream-like, and incomprehensible. It is forgotten that the Surrealists were not simply a group of young men who displayed their chaotic interior lives to the world, but rather artists and writers who worked very incisively toward changing the world and gaining self-knowledge and also reflected critically on social-political questions. The surrealist avant-garde considered itself to be a revolutionary countermovement to the bourgeois system of values. They questioned the status quo and existence during a time of great social and political instability through new imagery and deconstructed received ways of seeing and thinking through various artistic strategies.
The large survey exhibition (on both sides of the street with 450 photographs and many films) was organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, to be shown in collaboration with the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Fundación Mapfre, Madrid. With photographs and films by Man Ray, René Magritte, Jacques-André Boiffard, Paul Eluard, André Breton, Eli Lotar, Hans Bellmer, André Kertész, Dora Maar, Bill Brandt, Raoul Ubac, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, and many more.