Maze-like Exhibition Celebrates 100th Anniversary of Surrealism

Curated to look and feel like a labyrinth, the Centre Pompidou’s latest showcase celebrates the 100th anniversary of Surrealism. The Surrealism exhibition features an expansive array of multimedia artwork and literature—including the handwritten manuscript of the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto. Surréalisme opens to the public next week on Wednesday, September 4.

The upcoming Surrealism exhibition at Centre Pompidou is a creative deep dive into the century-old movement. With paintings, drawings, film, photography, and literary documents, Surréalisme showcases iconic Surrealist artists—from Salvador Dalí to Leonora Carrington—and their ever-evolving ideas. “Surrealism wasn’t a formalism,” Marie Sarré, curator of Modern collections at the Pompidou, told The Art Newspaper. “It was a collective adventure, a philosophy, you might say, that lasted for 40 years, if indeed it ever ended. It was incredibly vibrant, constantly reinventing itself.”

The Centre Pompidou’s Surrealism exhibition is organized in a spiraling maze, creating an appropriately surreal effect. Visitors will enter through a sculpted portal modeled after the Cabaret de l’Enfer (The Cabaret of Hell). After winding through the exhibition, they will emerge at the center of the spiral, where Breton’s original handwritten manuscript of the Surrealist Manifesto is on display. The maze-like design was inspired by artist Marcel Duchamp’s unique staging of the 1947 international Surrealism exhibition at Galerie Maeght in Paris.

A Rare Chance to See the Surrealist Manifesto

In 1924, the French writer and poet André Breton penned the Surrealist Manifesto that helped kick off the titular movement. Now, one hundred years later, the Centre Pompidou’s Surrealism exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see Breton’s handwritten manifesto up close. The document, which is on loan from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, has rarely been displayed publicly. Also, according to Sarré, not many people even know what the manifesto says.

“Even among insiders, who might otherwise quote manifestos including that of Futurism, people don’t really have Breton’s text in mind,” Sarré explained to The Art Newspaper. “And yet when you hear it, it really stays with you. You realize how current it is.” To share the 1924 message with a 2024 audience, the Pompidou collaborated with the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music to create an AI-generated recording of André Breton reading his Surrealist Manifesto aloud. Additionally, instead of a traditional audio guide, the exhibition is accompanied by a podcast, with actors reciting Surrealist literature and poetry.

Surréalisme opens to the public on September 4 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. The exhibition runs through January 15, 2025. Such exhibitions have been especially popular and provocative since the advent of Surrealism one century ago. Curator Marie Sarré emphasized the continued relevance of Surrealist art: “Considering how old-fashioned and conservative people found it for so long, Surrealism is an extremely modern movement…. Gen Zs too are disillusioned with the idea of progress and Modernism, they’re politically and ecologically engaged, anticolonialist, antinationalist—in a way that chimes with what the Surrealists were doing.”