In 1924, amid the wreckage of the Great War, French poet André Breton railed against the values of the world as it was and could never again be, one ruled by realism and rationality. “The mere word ‘freedom’ is the only one that still excites me,” Breton wrote in his Surrealist Manifesto. Revelations of the soul or society weren’t coming in the daytime. Only “the omnipotence of dreams,” he wrote, could liberate humanity. True or not, the ferocity of his belief inspired a century of strange poetry, paintings, sculpture, and more.
To mark the centennial of Surrealism, museums have once again measured the influence that the movement exerted—and still exerts—on art making. From an exhibition of Surrealist works by Caribbean and African Diasporic artists to a show of Surrealism from Eastern Europe, we’ve rounded up the dedicated programming worth catching worldwide.