Fantastic Juxtapositions in Dada and Surrealism

This display showcases the Henry Moore Institute’s rich collection of material relating to the Dada and Surrealism movements. It highlights publications which demonstrate the use of often amusing or unsettling juxtaposition of objects.

Included in the display is Max Ernst’s The Elephant Celebes (1921) and a detail from Salvador Dali’s Hallucination. Six Images of Lenin on a Grand Piano (1931) on the cover of Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution.

In Dada such juxtapositions came about through these artists’ commitment to both spontaneity and absurdity, whereas for the Surrealists it was a technique employed to create ‘dreamscapes’ and for challenging traditional methods of representation. In 1918, while based in Switzerland, Romanian artist Tristan Tzara wrote in his Dada Manifesto:

“I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense.”

Dada artists used familiar images and dismantled them, indicating their nihilistic attitude towards the establishment. In contrast, the Surrealists were interested in drawing out underlying psychological meanings that apparently simple objects might possess by disrupting their context.

This attitude is declared by French writer and poet André Breton in his own Surrealist Manifesto of 1924:

“Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.”