32 Iconic Masterpieces of Surrealism, Ranked

Bridget Bate Tichenor, Untitled (Egg Figures), 1966

Winston Churchill’s famed phrase about a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” would apply to many Surrealist artworks, but to none more so than Bridget Tichenor’s, which often feature people whose garments hide their faces and bodies. Here, two of Tichenor’s signature egg-like figures engage in conversation. Are these humans? They certainly seem to be, based on their hands, but masks conceal their faces, and their ovular forms suggest an alien species. That extraterrestrial quality is also evident in the landscape, a desertlike space that contains only a tall structure resembling a streetlight with four bulbs.

Tichenor, unlike her characters, was hardly a mystery to those who knew her. She modeled for fashion designer Coco Chanel, then became a socialite in New York while working for Vogue, before moving to Mexico City in the ’50s. There, she was no longer quite so famous, but she found some notable friends in an expatriate community of Surrealists that included Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Her paintings’ bizarre characters, with their own conversational styles, may be a reflection of the network Tichenor tapped in Mexico, far from Surrealism’s center in Europe.

Victor Brauner, Stable, Instable, Plain of Theus, 1942

Like many Surrealists working in Europe, the Romanian-born Victor Brauner experienced the tumult of World War II firsthand, bearing witness to both the rise of fascism and a spike in antisemitism, something that personally affected this Jewish artist. Among Brauner’s many responses to the wartime chaos is this painting, which depicts a thin, sinuous female figure whose long hair hangs between her legs and curls up behind her like a tail. Four clawed paws attached to her hair, and one of her hands, hold both a Janus-like head sitting atop a table and an arrow pointing down toward it.

The meaning of these symbols, rendered with a lack of depth that recalls hieroglyphics, remains unknowable. Instead, Brauner aims to evoke a mood where order has broken down and the potential for violence is a constant—hence the painting’s title. Even if the painting is not explicitly about Brauner’s life, it was clearly personal: Théus, the French commune referenced in the work’s name, is where he took refuge during the war.

Ramses Younan, Woman, 1942

Art et Liberté, the Egyptian avant-garde also known as al-Fann wa-l-Hurriyya, has commonly been classed in the West as an offshoot of Surrealism—even though many of the Art et Liberté manifestos do not explicitly invoke that movement. But looking at such a painting as this by Ramses Younan, it is tough to say that the movement held no tie at all to what was taking place in France and Spain. Instead, Younan’s Woman exemplifies how those outside the West reinterpreted Surrealism to their own ends, synthesizing all the dreamlike imagery flooding in from abroad with elements of their own culture.

The painting was made only a couple years after Younan wrote an essay decrying an epidemic of prostitution in Egypt, which he said was the result of poverty. Younan, like many male European Surrealists, frequently fragmented the women he painted. But whereas artists like Dalí and Magritte did so in ways that were not explicitly political, Younan’s style was intentionally in dialogue with his circumstances. He may not have done much to fix the misogyny associated with the art he was referencing, but he managed at least to give it a new context.

Woman, on the other hand, is much more sedate than those work. Like many of Dalí’s paintings, this one situates a female figure with a vacant, infinite landscape. Younan’s woman is mostly nude, sheathed only in a black fabric that covers her arms and waist. For Younan, her misshapen form represented the damage done to women like her in his home country.

Wilfredo Lam, Zambezia, Zambezia, 1930

If European Surrealists envisioned unidentifiable animals as a riposte to our rational world, artists from beyond the Continent sometimes rooted those creatures in age-old belief systems, showing that creatures were not always something to fear. Wifredo Lam, a Cuban-born artist of African, Chinese, and European descent, looked to the religion of Santería, whose imagery he often abstracted. Over and over, he painted the femme-cheval, a woman with a horselike head that may refer to the Santería concept that one becomes equine when possessed by an orisha, or divine being.

This painting is among the many depicting Lam’s femme-cheval. While this figure’s slender form and breasts identify it as female, it also seems to have male characteristics, such as a scrotum-like appendage that hangs from its “face.” This melding of male and female reflects Lam’s larger interest in states of transformation that disobeyed earthly binaries. For Lam, these bodily changes were violent and intended to unsettle. “Painting,” he once said, “is a torment.” And while he meant that in reference to the excruciating nature of his own process, it may apply as well to his figures, whose arms, hair, and torsos congeal into alien forms.

Marcel Jean, The Specter of Gardenia, 1936

Many Surrealist titles are less explanatory than they are confusing, and certainly that is the case here, the title referring to a flowering plant that the piece in no way represents. What it depicts can be summarized simply: a black plaster head atop a pedestal covered in faded velvet. Its eyes lend the oddly placid face a certain steeliness: they are zippered shut. Jean leaves it a mystery as to whether there really is anything hidden beneath.

Chance was key to the Surrealists, since they believed it could unlock the mysteries of the human subconscious. In the case of this sculpture, Jean happened upon all its materials, including its film-strip collar, at a Paris flea market. He then reconstituted them to form this artwork, which reconfigures the objects in ways that differed vastly from their original purpose. The sculpture thus exemplifies how the Surrealists appropriated readymade objects they came across, investing these knickknacks with new life.

Inji Efflatoun, La Jeune Fille et le montstre, 1942

“People wondered why a girl from a rich family was so tormented, so unhappy and refusing a lot of things,” said Inji Efflatoun, an artist who was born to an aristocratic family and later became an avowed Marxist. In fact, like many of her fellow members in Art et Liberté, an Egyptian Surrealist group, she had a lot to be upset about. Along with her colleagues, she denounced misogyny, class oppression, and colonialism, and she used her paintings as a means of representing the very struggles she sought to highlight.

La jeune fille et le monstre was one of several paintings Efflatoun made during the early ’40s that displayed one being that threatens another, seemingly disadvantaged figure. The aggressor’s body seems formed from licking flames that light up the earth below, sending even more smoke into the darkened sky. This apocalyptic scene was a metaphor: Efflatoun had in mind a poem by Georges Henein, who compared war to a form of rape. The painting thus visualized Egypt as a battlefield during World War II, a global conflict that had ensnared the neutral nation simply because it was under British control. In that way, La jeune fille et le monstre shows how Egyptian artists harnessed Surrealist styles toward revolutionary ends.

Alice Rahon, Frida Kahlo’s Ballad, 1956–66

Rather than identifying with any specific movement, Alice Rahon once called herself a cave painter, referring to how she utilized timeless symbols that could just as well have appeared in a millennia-old archaeological site. Her fascination with caves derived from a visit to a Spanish cave with her first husband, the Surrealist artist Wolfgang Paalen, and only grew when she came to Mexico at the invitation of Frida Kahlo. Rahon and Kahlo remained close afterward, and following Kahlo’s death, Rahon memorialized her with this work, which relied on the sparse visual language of cave paintings.

In this piece, which she started painting the year after Kahlo’s death, a trail of little figures walks through a bluish expanse that has at its center a structure somewhat like a Ferris wheel. The work alluded to Mexico City’s Plaza de Coyoacán, which Rahon and Kahlo personally visited together. The amusement park they saw there appears in this work, the painting’s cobalt backdrop also an allusion to reality—specifically, to the walls of Kahlo’s Casa Azul. Rahon’s painted memorial to a lost friend is notable for the way it recycles elements of reality, then defamiliarizes them, recasting them in a dreamy context that is notably Surreal.

Andre Masson, Automatic Drawing, 1924

Many Surrealists sought to envision what went on inside one’s head through hallucinatory tableaux. André Masson one-upped them all with his automatist art, which was supposedly made without any preconceived composition or idea in mind, as most artworks are. Instead, Masson claimed to let his hand run free, allowing it to move spontaneously. To do so, he claimed, was a pure representation of how his brain worked, without any sense of reason enlisted to tamp down its creativity.

Drawings like this one were among the results. For the most part, they are scribbles, although in some cases, vague semblances of appendages and faces emerge. Masson would sometimes go back to his drawings, adding further detail, and that indicates that his “Automatic Drawings” were never fully automatic. Still, they posed a provocative means of art-making at a time when even abstractions were thought out in advance—and plotted the way forward for artists like Jackson Pollock, whose splatter paintings took up Masson’s mantle in the heyday of Abstract Expressionism.

Rita Kernn-Larsen, Self-Portrait (Know Thyself), 1937

It is no secret that male Surrealists tended to objectify women, sexualizing their bodies, viewing them as femmes-enfants, beings that experienced the world as though they were babies. Women, not surprisingly, approached their own forms in a vastly different way, and this portrait by Rita Kernn-Larsen, one of the foremost Danish Surrealists, stands as proof.

The painting shows a mirror that seems to both reflect and refract Kernn-Larsen’s image. It is easy to make out a seated Kernn-Larsen, her head unnaturally turned away from the viewer. It is less easy to divine a face, however, given that the mirror’s reflection has disassembled into a giant eye, a slanted nose, and a trio of lips. In this way, she has escaped being seen by others.

Kernn-Larsen has crafted here a deliberately imagined self-portrait. The lips were composed using an automatic line, an element supposedly dictated by her own subconscious. That gesture plants this work firmly within the artist’s mind, freeing her from having to represent herself as others might see her. Instead, she asks viewers to comprehend her as she might regard herself.

Max Ernst, The Robing of the Bride, 1939

Jan van Eyck, William Hogarth, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and many more across the centuries represented weddings in their paintings, no doubt because romantic union is as timeless a theme as any. Leave it to a Surrealist, though, to pervert nuptial imagery, turning it bizarre and alluring.

Max Ernst’s Robing of the Bride depicts a nude woman being readied for her big day by a menacing bird and a female attendant, along with a sobbing, four-breasted figure with a penis and webbed feet that kneels below. Although the title and the central figure’s veil suggest that these events are taking place ahead of a marriage, there’s nothing so sentimental about what’s portrayed: the figures’ bodies are misshapen, and there is a strange erotic tension between the bride and her attendant, whose breast she seems to caress with one hand. The groom, meanwhile, is unseen. (Add to all this the work’s real-life context: Ernst is thought to have painted his actual lover at the time, Leonora Carrington, whom he never did marry.)

At the upper left hangs a painting whose composition mirrors this scene. The wavy texture of that picture—made using a technique called decalcomania, in which wet paint is pressed unevenly against a surface and allowed to dry—even mirrors that of the attendant’s giant headdress. In creating this mise en abyme, Ernst mixes life and art. The confluence of the two, Ernst suggests, yields a fantasy that, ironically, offers a window onto reality.

Claude Cahun, Que me veux-tu?, 1928

In a few of her most famous self-portraits, Claude Cahun’s image appears to fracture or double—a response, perhaps, to the fact that Cahun had reconstructed her own identity to her liking. Her name was a chosen one, and she said that her gender identity could change frequently. “Masculine? Feminine?” she once wrote. “It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”

Photographs such as this one suggest an artist whose sense of self was deliberately unstable. In Que me veux-tu?, two pictures of Cahun are transposed, so that the nearly bald artist appears to be in conversation with herself. Yet if this is an imagined dialogue, it is one in which both parties are talking past each other—their eyes do not meet, and their bodies appear to twist apart, throwing the photograph out of alignment. The photograph’s title translates from the French to “What do you want from me?” But in a delicious paradox, both “you” and “me” are the same person: Cahun, who here contains multiple people inside herself.

Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943

Experimental filmmaker Maya Deren stated that she was not a Surrealist, even though her work contained a dream logic that appeared to align her with the movement. Still, her films have regularly appeared in exhibitions about that avant-garde, including in the Surrealism-themed 2022 Venice Biennale, and works such as Meshes of the Afternoon contain the same dream logic that guides much of the art in the Surrealist canon. For that reason, film critic Richard Brody called this film a masterwork of “unrealism.”

Meshes of the Afternoon doesn’t have much of a plot. Across its 14 minutes, a woman, played by Deren herself, interacts with a veiled figure who has a mirror for a face, picks up a key, ascends a staircase, and appears to fall asleep and wake back up again—though it is never totally obvious whether any, or all, of this is actually happening. This is partly because Deren makes prominent use of subjective camerawork, so that viewers can dream in first person alongside Deren’s character. She even called this work a “trance film.”

As with many Surrealist works, it is tough to say what Meshes of the Afternoon is about—its symbols remain unresolved, its semblance of a story left mostly incomplete. But there is a focus on the relationship between Deren’s character and a man who appears to be her husband (Alexandr Hackenschmied, who served as the film’s cinematographer and was in reality Deren’s spouse). At one point, the woman picks up a knife and hurls it at the man’s face, which appears to shatter, as though his visage were the mirror seen earlier in the film. Behind his face is a vast beach—liberation, perhaps, that exists beyond the domestic space this woman inhabits.

Man Ray, Veiled Erotic, 1933

For art historian Whitney Chadwick, Meret Oppenheim was the “perfect example of the Surrealist woman” because of her “uninhibited behavior and creative spirit.” For many men in her orbit, that also made her a shining example of the femme-enfant, a woman-child hybrid who viewed the world with a naivete that men did not. Through her, men could access another perspective that could in turn offer inspiration.

Essential in constructing the femme-enfant was this photograph of Oppenheim made by Man Ray, which helped cement her place in the Surrealist movement. The picture shows a nude Oppenheim leaning against a printing press’ wheel, one inked arm resting on the wheel, the back of her hand held to her forehead. It was published by André Breton beside one of his short stories, in which he wrote: “Convulsive beauty will be erotic-veiled, explosive-static, magic-circumstantial, or will not be at all.”

While the meaning of Man Ray’s photograph is not abundantly obvious, its title appears to suggest it was meant to stimulate. The power dynamics were not even—Oppenheim was more than 20 years Man Ray’s junior when it was taken, and though she has sometimes received credit alongside him for making the image, she denied that she played an active role in its production, saying “he was the boss.” But Veiled Erotic contains more ambiguity than initially meets the eye. The wheel hides Oppenheim’s breasts and pubic region, and the handle lends her a metal phallus. In imploding the gender binary, Man Ray complicates matters in a quietly revolutionary way.

Maria Martins, The Impossible III, 1946

While Surrealism was taking hold in Western Europe, a tendency known as Anthropophagia was finding a following among the Brazilian avant-garde. As defined by poet Oswald de Andrade’s 1923 manifesto inspired by Tarsila do Amaral’s paintings, Anthropophagia found in the cannibalism of other cultures a metaphor for social progress, the idea being that anything and everything could be consumed to move forward. Surrealism, for some Brazilians, was viewed as a sign of this progress.

Maria Martins’s The Impossible III (1946) counts among the various works that fused the aesthetics of Surrealism and Anthropophagia. In it, two beings seem to eat one another, their heads forming pointed tendrils that do battle with each other. Is this a violent encounter or not? The nudity on display seems to indicate it may have a sensual dimension as well. But Martins seemed to imply that the piece spoke to society’s unhealable divides when she said “it is nearly impossible to make people understand each other.” It is also perhaps impossible to fully understand this work, and that’s what makes it so potent.

Germaine Dulac, The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928

Not many filmmakers can claim they incited a riot merely by screening their latest work, but Germaine Dulac did just at the first showing in 1928 of The Seashell and the Clergyman, sometimes credited as the first Surrealist film.

By today’s standards, the film is only somewhat controversial. Adapted from a scenario by Antonin Artaud, the film has just a semblance of narrative. Its focus is a priest who battles his sexual desire for a general’s wife, but his dreams of an erotic encounter are rarely made explicit. What we get, mostly, is a succession of memorable imagery, each tableau more strange than the last: quivering hands superimposed over a woman’s neck, a head splitting in half, two palms summoning a castle on a hill. (Sly editing tricks account for all these impossible images.)

Amid all this, there is a sequence in which a man rips free a woman’s shell-shaped brassiere. As he waves the garment around, the image fades to a ritzy ballroom where moneyed couples dance. Dulac, who was openly queer, pitted sexual subversion against Christian bourgeois mores, and showed that the two were not exactly compatible. The friction created in the process remains palpable decades on from that fateful initial screening.

Eileen Agar, Angel of Anarchy, 1936–40

Who, or what, is an angel of anarchy? The short answer, for Eileen Agar, was that there was no such thing—she merely picked the title because she liked its alliteration, according to her autobiography. The long answer is that she had in mind Herbert Read, a leader of sorts to the British offshoot of the Surrealist art movement, of which Agar was a part. She may also have been thinking of the Anarchists’ role in the Spanish Civil War, which was being waged at the time.

But the sculpture itself, strangely enough, depicts neither Read nor a wartime scene, but something else altogether: a plaster head wrapped in silky fabrics, adorned with beads, and covered partially in feathers. Agar initially modeled the head on her husband, Joseph Bard, and that lent the work an erotic charge.

Agar’s sculpture is so mystifying because there’s no telling what lies beneath this head’s blindfold—something that the now-lost first version of the piece did not have. This artist was, in other words, trying to create an enigma, something that resisted the scrutiny with which inquiring eyes regarded it. In that way, the piece is emblematic of female Surrealists’ tendency to conceal crucial bits of information. It also speaks well to Agar’s own uncertain moment, when the threat of World War II loomed.

Roberto Matta, The Earth Is a Man, 1942

If objects and people shapeshift in the works of many Surrealists, Roberto Matta’s paintings are different in one key regard: it’s society itself that’s mutating in these canvases. The Chilean-born artist saw little difference between the political state and his interior state, something that he even broached with this work, whose title suggests that our planet itself is a macrocosm of the humans who inhabit it.

Matta named the work after a screenplay he wrote about his friend, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who was assassinated by agents of the Franco regime during the Spanish Civil War. But García Lorca is nowhere to be found in this picture, which Matta would have termed an “inscape” or a “psychological morphology.” There is the semblance of a screaming figure on the right, as well as, perhaps, a blazing sun. But these are exceptions in a painting where all the imagery seems to blur, Matta allowing the individual elements to bleed into each other.

Having trained as an architect, Matta did not map out a composition in advance, but instead applied paint using brushes or rags and such to add and subtract as he worked. He painted under the sign of automatism, ostensibly allowing his subconscious to guide his actions. In doing so, his worlds evolved on their own, without any outside influence. If Matta’s earth was a person, the man himself was in a constant state of flux.

Salvador Dalí, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), 1936

For a painting whose title alludes to the Spanish Civil War, this Salvador Dalí work seems bizarrely devoid of political import. This is in part because, as in most of his works, Dalí was less interested in commenting on the day’s events than he was in exploring what they indicated about the state of humanity.

He described the Spanish Civil War, a conflict set off by General Francisco Franco’s military coup, as a “phenomenon of natural history,” and the horrifying creature at the work’s center as a “vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of autostrangulation.” When it came to this painting, Dalí does not seem to have said much about the rise of fascism vis-à-vis the Franco regime. (And perhaps it’s a good thing: some Surrealists later found themselves alienated by Dalí, who would go on to speak favorably about Nazism and Hitler.)

What we’re left with is a bizarre image of a man who sprouts one breast and appears to fold on himself, his partially decayed appendages falling into a squarish arrangement. His face is contorted in a scream that expresses not only the physical pain being wrought upon him, but also the existential suffering caused by his circumstances. Indeed, this being seems to transcend his species, metamorphosing into something melty, alien, and altogether unnatural. Dalí’s body horror provides the perfect metaphor for the inhumanity of modern Europe, making it an image that would gain currency during World War II.

Koga Harue, Umi (The Sea), 1929

As Surrealism’s tendrils reached all corners of the globe, stretching from France to Latin America and Asia, the style mutated. In Japan, for example, artists who aligned themselves with the Surrealists sought to divorce the movement from reason, which they viewed as a Western concept. Thus was born Scientific Surrealism, a Japanese style that embedded in it kikai-shugi, the fascination with machines that pervaded the country’s culture in the 1920s.

This painting became one of Scientific Surrealism’s defining works. It depicts an ocean populated by a bizarre mix of gadgetry, plant life, and crustaceans. There’s a ship with part of its side cut away to reveal its metallic innards; it appears both on the water’s surface and below it. And there’s a lighthouse that juts in too, floating unnaturally atop the sea. Koga sets up a sharp contrast between tradition and modernity: note the wooden ship sailing beneath a Graf Zeppelin, presumably imported from Germany. He also suggests the incursion of Western values, with the pointing bather derived from a postcard from Europe sold in Japan at the time, as art historian Chinghsin Wu has pointed out.

Umi (The Sea) drew attention upon its debut, and not just from artists in Koga’s circle. Some were suspect of Koga’s embrace of Western aesthetics, which seemingly ran counter to the explicitly proletarian art being made by a number of Japanese artists at the time. Ironically, this meant that, to some, European Surrealism’s attack on bourgeois norms appeared to have been lost in translation. But today, Umi stands as a towering example of Surrealist subversion because it puzzles the senses, even while remaining so cold and unfeeling—much like the surfaces of Koga’s machinery.

Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936

Many Surrealists sought to defamiliarize the everyday by transmuting commonplace objects into artworks, shifting them until they were odd and not entirely functional. Arguably, no attempt at doing so was more successful than Meret Oppenheim’s Object, a sculpture that became so famous that the Swiss artist spent a good portion of her career trying to dig herself out from under its reputation.

Surrealist lore has it that Oppenheim was inspired to make the strange assortment following a conversation with Pablo Picasso. He noticed some bracelets she was wearing that had fur on them, and said that just about anything could be dressed with the stuff. With that remark in mind, Oppenheim covered a teacup, a saucer, and a spoon with the pelt of a Chinese gazelle.

These items of dining ware are like those found in nice restaurants that are generally home to gentility and manners. All the same, this sensuous work may induce impolite thoughts, begging consideration of how it might feel to mouth a furry cup. Bourgeois society might discourage such fantasies, but Oppenheim urges viewers to indulge them. For that reason, the work’s kinky eroticism remains electric even today, nearly 90 years later.

Leonora Carrington, Self-Portrait, ca. 1937–38

Every self-portrait is in some sense imagined: artists conjure visions of themselves that they wish to convey to the world. But this Leonora Carrington painting adds another level of imagination that many self-portraits lack, conjuring both a vision of the artist that is not entirely real and a totally new universe that seems unbound by the rules of our own.

Here, Carrington is seen seated in a chair, raising one pointed finger to a lactating hyena. Floating on a wall behind her is a rocking horse; visible through a window is an actual equine that gallops through a forest. It is easy to analyze all these symbols, as many others have. Carrington herself identified with hyenas, which she described as having an “insatiable curiosity” just like herself. And she drew her interest in horses from her Irish mother, who told her of Celtic lore in which these animals help people traverse multiple realms.

But examining the individual elements of this painting deprives it of its weirdness and mystery, which Carrington heightens by deliberately disregarding basic painterly principles—the shadows do not correspond to a single light source, and the sense of depth is awkward, causing the tiled floor to bend in space. Viewers may try to crack the code of this painting, but they will always come up short, since Carrington herself is the only one who seems fully able to unlock its logic. Thus, Carrington’s self-portrait is one of the ultimate Surrealist artworks: a painting that poses the artist as a shaman with the ability to reach other worlds.

Remedios Varo, Armonia, 1950

Remedios Varo, like many of the women artists she knew, truly believed there were occult systems that guided the world—and even sought to access them through her artistic practice. But she did not write off science entirely, viewing it as a possible pathway to help prove that magic was a reality.

Perhaps that’s why the setting in Armonía more closely resembles a laboratory than it does a secret lair, replete as it is with a set of sleek beakers, a basin loaded with glass prisms, and a bookshelf storing knowledge. Inside this space, a figure is shown at work, composing a tune by sliding pieces around a three-dimensional musical staff. Yet the rigorous logic that undergirds math, science, and music is also blown open by the women who emerge from this room’s peeling walls. One of those lithe women even helps this composer create his tunes. As in other Varo works, her presence is a reference to forms of knowledge that are female, understood only by women.

The fusion of phenomena, both explicable and not, is mirrored by Varo’s meld of past and present. Though she represents a form of artistic production that feels derived from science fiction, the setting where all this takes place contains arched windows that might just as well appear in a medieval scriptorium. For centuries, artists have represented supernatural happenings invading the everyday—think of the Merode Altarpiece, a masterpiece of 15th-century Dutch art in which an Annunciation scene is set within a contemporary abode. Varo’s work is thus not so different from that altarpiece, except that nearly all her characters are women. For Varo, the future was female, as was the past.

Toyen, The Message of the Forest, 1936

One could argue that the Surrealists were all-in nonconformists in their own way, but even among followers of the movement, Toyen was a true nonpareil. Even this Czech artist’s chosen moniker was a statement of her eccentricity. Born Marie Čermínová, she gave herself a name that may have been a reference to the French word for citizen or the Czech words for it is he, perhaps in allusion to her subversive gender identity. But the word Toyen does not technically mean anything, and her paintings, with their sparse landscapes and anthropomorphized walls, are equally odd.

Poselstvi Lesa can be interpreted in the ways used to analyze works by the French Surrealists, with whom the Czech Surrealists shared a close bond. As in works by figures such as Dalí and Ernst, the subject here is a creaturely being—in this case, a feather-covered animal without a face—that resists legibility. Those artists, and many other male Surrealists, represented women in dreamy tableaux, much as Toyen did here, with a female head clasped in the bird’s sharp claw.

Yet, whereas those men fixed on the female form, eroticizing and objectifying their models, Toyen’s woman is literally disembodied. This head stonily returns the viewer’s gaze, offering no glimpse into her psychology. Seeing this, further questions arise: Why is this animal missing a foot? What explains the wood-like background behind this zoological whatsit? Viewers cannot decrypt the forest’s nominal message here, and therein lies its power.

Aimé Césaire, Return to My Native Land, 1942

Martinican poet Aimé Césaire and his wife, Suzanne, having spent time with André Breton, became the leading exponents of Surrealism in the Caribbean during the early 1940s. The Césaires felt that Surrealism’s tenets had something in common with Négritude, a 1930s movement that upheld Black creativity as a means of resistance to French values. Aimé fused the two tendencies to demonstrate against the French faith in reason, offering up dreamy scenarios in his writing with an anti-colonial sentiment. “Surrealism,” he once recalled, “provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for.”

Césaire’s magnum opus, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a hybrid text that is part prose, part verse poetry. First published in 1939 and revised twice, Notebook presents his revolt against French colonialism abstractly, constantly switching perspectives, confusing pronouns, and seeming at times to slide in and out of reality.

It begins with a lengthy description of a Martinique that has been defiled—a nation whose “malarial blood routs the sun with its overheated pulse.” Martinique’s hills at various points bleed, defecate, and vomit, and are more generally anthropomorphized in the same way as Surrealist landscapes often depicted in paintings. But Césaire is not keen to present his nation as a victim. By the book’s end, he has acknowledged that “Europe has force-fed us with lies and bloated us with pestilence,” and that “no race has a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, and on strength.” A Wifredo Lam illustration that appeared in the original printing closes out the book. It features a winged, bare-breasted figure that soars into the stars, seemingly liberated from the colonialist oppression that for so long pervaded the landscape below.

Kay Sage, In the Third Sleep, 1944

Kay Sage’s imagined landscapes are almost always devoid of people. Instead, her metropolises are filled mostly with bent fabrics, half-built structures, and scaffolding, as though these elements were all that was left behind by a civilization that had reached a state of total decline. More often than not, these elements are set against a dreary sky too, imbuing her paintings with a sense of hopelessness. (Her husband, the Surrealist Yves Tanguy, also painted sparse landscapes beneath cloudy skies, but his pictures, with their blobby inhabitants, seem upbeat by comparison.)

With her 1944 canvas In the Third Sleep, Sage drove home a central aspect of her paintings: their emptiness. Despite the fact that this painting is 12 feet wide, there’s not much in it. In that way, it feels like the product of an alienated mind. And while Sage was not fond of explaining her paintings’ origins, she did make one remark that seems to suggest they were pictures of what went on her head: “I do know that while I’m painting I feel as though I were living in the place.”

That place, at least as it manifests in this painting, is limitless and expansive, but it’s also unlivable. The painting appears to depict a raised area that abuts a field of cracked earth. There is no water and little sun, despite the tall mast-like forms in the front casting a long shadow. All that Sage offers is vastness, grayness, and desolation.

Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou, 1928

Critic Ado Kyrou once wrote that Un Chien Andalou marked the first time ever in cinema history that a director sought to “alienate all potential spectators,” and there’s good reason why he made that claim. Even if you have not seen the film, you’ve heard about that excruciating shot in which a razor is dragged across a woman’s eyeball. In actuality, the peeper belonged to a dead calf, not a human, but the effect is much the same: pure horror. To watch it is to see the world anew.

That shot, of course, occupies a very small span of this 16-minute film’s run time. But other images spread throughout prove just as memorable: a hand lined with ants, two pianos being hauled across a living room with two priests and slain donkeys in tow, a man aggressively fondling a woman’s breasts, someone’s mouth disappearing. The film’s editing disturbs the traditional sense of spatial and temporal logic that would tie these disparate shots together—not that there’s any real plot guiding it all.

Ultimately, Un Chien Andalou is a film that’s all about shock value. It is one of the clearest Surrealist statements about the necessity of provocation as a means of waking up passive viewers and going against reason. Film critic Roger Ebert, punning this short’s most famous shot, once called Un Chien Andalou “eye-opening,” which is perhaps the only way to describe a work that continues to be so potent.

Ithell Colquhoun, Scylla, 1938

For this painting, Ithell Colquhoun looked to Greek mythology, focusing on Scylla, a creature who made an appearance in Homer’s Odyssey, among other tales. In that poem, Odysseus encounters Scylla as he attempts to pass through a channel while also avoiding Charybdis, another nearby mythical monster. To escape unscathed requires some tricky navigation—the channel is small, and Scylla and Charybdis are close together. While Odysseus survives the passage, several members of his crew do not, having been flung off the vessel, into Scylla’s mouth.

Colquhoun said she sourced her imagery not from an epic poem but from a dream she had. She envisioned herself in a bath, then found that because of an “alienation of sensation,” parts of her body had changed into rocks and seaweed. She captures her body mid-transformation, here rendering her pubic hair as algae and her legs as two stones that jut from the water. Meanwhile, a boat—possibly Odysseus’s—approaches to sail through.

Dawn Adès, an art historian who has written prolifically about Surrealism, once described these boulders as being part of a “phallic landscape.” Colquhoun then corrected Adès, saying that she viewed the work as being “primarily a feminine symbol.” That both interpretations can coexist speaks to the power of Scylla. Colquhoun was intentionally working within the tradition of Dalí’s “double images,” or illusions that represent two pictures at once. Here, she uses that style to implode the gender binary, a bifurcated system that can easily be upended when its halves come together, as they memorably do in Scylla.

Dora Maar, Portrait d’Ubu, 1936

What, exactly, does this photograph depict? Not even Dora Maar would say. The long-nailed creature with a bulbous head and a scaly shell is commonly thought to be an armadillo, yet some scholars have conjectured that it may be a fetus, leaving open the question of whether this unborn animal was human or not. The photograph’s title adds some specificity, albeit just a little. The name references Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play, Ubu Roi, whose namesake protagonist Jarry described as having an animal-like appearance that “makes him overall brother to the most aesthetically horrible of all marine beasts, the sea louse.”

Whether sea louse or armadillo, or something else entirely, the unidentifiable being Maar depicted has held appeal for many, art historian Rosalind Krauss declaring it an “emblematic surrealist photograph.” Its allure lies largely in Maar’s bizarre treatment of the creature, which she photographed at close range, allowing its head to loom particularly large. That unusual compositional choice crops away necessary details, like its feet and even its surroundings.

Maar leaves the work’s viewers with something ordinary that appears unearthly, perhaps even a little nightmarish. If many Surrealists scoured their dreams for inspiration, Maar knew all too well that one needn’t go far to find strangeness. All it took was a camera to capture it.

Leonor Fini, Le Bout du Monde, 1949

In her famed book on women Surrealists, art historian Whitney Chadwick noted a gendered divide in how artists associated with the movement depicted female figures. Men, Chadwick said, depicted women as erotic playthings, while women portrayed members of their own sex in a mode far less inviting. Le Bout du Monde, a self-portrait of sorts by Leonor Fini, typifies the tendency, with a composition that seems deliberately to withhold a full view of its female subject, both physically and psychologically.

The painting depicts a big-haired blonde standing in a marsh amid floating leaves, a skull, and the heads of birdlike animals. A fiery sunset looms behind her, casting much of the scene in darkness. It may be tempting to suggest the work is about self-reflection—to say that Fini, in representing a person who looks like her, employs the water’s glassy surface as a mirror. But this Fini avatar seems totally disinterested, regarding the viewer with an icy gaze that communicates nothing about what’s going on in her head.

If anything, this Fini seems totally incapable of peering down; if she did, she might be unsettled to see a sullen version of herself, one older and slightly monstrous, with lips curled in a faint smile. The notion of her own mortality fascinated Fini, and the work’s title, which translates to The End of the World, hints at that sense of finality. If the reflection on the water’s surface is to be trusted, her end is not far off. It seems telling that when Fini returned to this composition several years later to make a sequel, she represented its subject as one step closer to death, with sicklier skin and a shaggier bouffant.

Frida Kahlo, What the Water Gave Me, 1938

Like many women on this list, Frida Kahlo did not identify as a Surrealist, even though she periodically seemed to accept being characterized so by André Breton himself. Many have speculated about why this was. Here are the Mexican-born artist’s own words: “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” Others have offered alternate explanations, including art historian Whitney Chadwick, who has written that the male-dominated French nexus of the movement alienated women to a point where they were hesitant to pledge allegiance to it.

Whatever the case, What the Water Gave Me famously appeared in a 1938 show in New York at Julien Levy Gallery, which occupies a central place in Surrealist lore. The painting’s subject seems to suggest an affiliation with Surrealism. It features a view of Kahlo’s feet in a bathtub in which float several bizarre visions: a shell that sprays water, a skyscraper rising from an erupting volcano, a giant bird sitting atop a tree, and a woman’s dress. Some of these images had appeared in prior Kahlo paintings, and many were inscrutable to the viewers who passed before them.

But back to Kahlo’s words: the painting does, indeed, represent a reality, and that reality clearly belongs to the artist herself. She’s included details that are anatomically accurate to her own body—one toe is bent, and a scar runs down one thigh, both referring to Kahlo’s various surgeries in the years leading up to this painting. Moreover, the work situates the viewer within Kahlo’s perspective, asking the viewer to see her as Kahlo might see herself. The strange flora and fauna above her are scientifically impossible, but then again, life doesn’t always obey the laws of reason, and certainly, Kahlo could not always explain what happened to her—certainly not the bus crash that broke her spinal column and fractured her leg in 1925. Surrealism was her reality, whether Breton saw it that way or not.

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1929

A cannon aimed at an array of pictures, a painted landscape shattering to reveal the environment behind it: these were just two of the ways that René Magritte did violence to images, revealing them to be distortions of reality. But none of his attempts at doing so have proven quite as memorable as The Treachery of Images, a Surrealist artwork that has achieved mainstream fame.

Many who have never even seen the work can quote the phrase painted in it: this is not a pipe, paired with an image of a pipe that seems to contradict the words. The operative word here is image, since it is true that this is not a pipe, but a picture of one. If paintings were historically assumed to represent reality, Magritte urged his viewers to consider that artworks were often at odds with it. The nominal treachery is a reference to this breakdown of trust in art’s power.

While The Treachery of Images contains no dreamlike imagery, the painting excited many Surrealists, including André Breton, who paid homage to it in his writing. Yet more than simply acting as a guiding star to many Surrealists, the work paved the way for future movements—most notably Conceptualism in the late ’60s, whose artists pitted texts and pictures against one another to explore the nature of art itself.

Dorothea Tanning, Birthday, 1942

Doors left ajar recur in many works by Surrealists as metaphors for the opening of portals to other dimensions and psychological states. No Surrealist doors are quite so seductive as the ones that extend into infinite hallways in Dorothea Tanning’s self-portrait Birthday, where she stands beside a winged figure that refers to Lemuria, the millennia-old continent from Theosophist lore.

While this labyrinthine succession of doors might seem impossible, it was, in fact, based on Tanning’s New York studio. Noticing her apartment’s array of rooms, Tanning decided to amplify the cramped effect of the unit, which here appears inescapable. She tilts its wooden floor, skewing the perspective, and rendering this hallway’s contiguous room as a liminal space without an exit. Tanning poses herself with one hand on a doorknob, as if to suggest she is the one who has unlocked these many portals.

Her flinty gaze stonewalls the viewer, refusing any psychological insight; there is no erotic charge either, despite her bared breasts. Moreover, there is no explanation for her creaturely companion, or for the viny tendrils that grow around her skirt, which seem to be from another indeterminate era. The painting’s mystery nags at the eye—and this was something Tanning seemed intentionally to provoke. “You see, enigma is a very healthy thing, because it encourages the viewer to look beyond the obvious and commonplace,” she said.