Surrealism

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

Surrealism is the artistic and literary movement born in Paris in the 1920s that set out to free the imagination from the control of reason. Inspired by Freud's psychoanalysis, the Surrealists explored dreams, the unconscious, chance and desire, aiming for a "surreality" in which dream and reality merge. It was not a movement born for design, yet the Surrealists invented some of the most famous and most imitated objects of the twentieth century.

Breton and the manifesto

The movement was officially born in October 1924, when the poet André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto, which spoke of "pure psychic automatism": writing and painting without the control of reason. Painters such as Max Ernst, Joan Miró, René Magritte, Man Ray and, from the late 1920s, Salvador Dalí joined or came close to the group. The Surrealists loved objects: objects found at flea markets, combined in unexpected ways, turned into something mysterious or unsettling.

Surrealist objects

The most famous objects came from the meeting between Dalí and the wealthy English collector Edward James. In 1936 Dalí created the Lobster Telephone for him, with the receiver replaced by a lobster. In 1937–1938 the sofas shaped like the lips of Mae West, the actress Dalí found fascinating, were made: one is now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 1936 the Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim covered a teacup, saucer and spoon in fur: Object (Breakfast in Fur), now at MoMA, became the symbol of an everyday object made impossible to use. Oppenheim also designed a table with a gilded top and legs shaped like bird's feet, still reproduced today.

Fashion, interiors and Italian design

Surrealism soon conquered fashion and interiors. The couturier Elsa Schiaparelli collaborated with Dalí and Jean Cocteau, creating astonishing clothes and accessories. In Italy two designers took up its legacy in a highly personal way. In Turin Carlo Mollino, fascinated by Surrealism from 1934, designed sensual, organic furniture inspired by the forms of animals and the human body. In Milan Piero Fornasetti, encouraged by Gio Ponti, decorated plates, furniture and screens with dreamlike images, including hundreds of variations on the face of the singer Lina Cavalieri, his muse.

Legacy

Surrealism taught design that an object can surprise, make people dream and even disturb them. Its ideas returned in the soft shapes of Biomorphism and Organic design, and above all in the 1960s and 1970s, when Pop design and Radical design took up the game of displacement: Studio 65's lip-shaped sofa Bocca (1970) is an open tribute to Dalí's sofa. Still today, every object that plays with irony and the unexpected owes something to the Surrealists.