A century ago, artists who survived the trenches of World War I captured humanity’s capacity for destruction, but also the collective potential for revolution. Naomi Klein asks what the Surrealists can they teach us about confronting the far-right in a new age of genocide?
To proclaim something surreal in 2025 is to say almost nothing at all. Catchy pop tunes generated by AI are surreal. A heat wave in the Arctic is surreal. A reality show star who becomes president of the United States–twice–is surreal. Generally, what is meant by the term is ‘unreal’: the replacement of organic life with artifice, which is the contemporary condition.
Yet, at its inception, Surrealism reached for the precise opposite: it was a fervent and collective quest for the very essence of life, the more organic the better. As Breton put it, he and his comrades were on a mission to probe existence to find “a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak”. This often meant drawing attention to the various forms of artifice that passed themselves off as realism, whether placid landscapes or happy families.
More picks about art
How American Camouflage Conquered the World
“The world-famous MultiCam pattern was designed for the military by two Brooklyn hipsters. Now everyone—from babies to ICE agents—is suited up for battle.”
The Body I Couldn’t Abstract
“Motherhood reshaped how I see shame, art, and the female body.”
In Search of Banksy
“The British street artist’s identity has been debated, and closely guarded, for decades. A quest to solve the riddle took Reuters from a bombed-out Ukrainian village to London and downtown Manhattan—and uncovered much more than a name.”
