Fun Surrealism: Embrace the Weird. Imagine a clock that’s melted and has slipped off a table like melted cheese. There is no one in the painting who worry's about it. The ants crawl around, the sky remains calm, and the clock is just looking tired.
That’s Salvador Dalí, and if you smiled, congratulations. You get fun surrealism.
Most people think surreal art belongs in hushed galleries where everyone nods at things they don’t understand. Some of it does. But plenty of it is just play. A pipe that says it isn’t a pipe. A fur teacup. A painter giving a lecture in a diving suit. These folks were goofing around, and they wanted company.
What surrealism actually is
It started in Paris in back in the 1920s. The word means “beyond reality,” which sounds out there, but the idea is simple. Let dreams run the show for a while.
You know how dreams go. You’re at school, except it’s also your grandmother’s kitchen, and your math teacher is a giraffe. Nobody questions it. Surrealists tried to paint that feeling, and here’s the odd part: they painted it neatly. Sharp edges, careful shadows. A melting clock looks far weirder when it’s done with the care of a realistic portrait.
A quick bit of history
Before surrealism came Dada, born back in 1916 in Zurich while the First World War was happening. The Dada art crowd was fed up. If sensible people had built a world that produced that war, why bother being sensible? So they made nonsense on purpose. One recipe for a poem went like this: cut words out of a newspaper, shake them in a bag, pull them out one at a time. Done. Poem.
Then came along André Breton, a French poet who’d worked in a hospital during the war and loved Freud’s ideas about surreal dreams. In 1924 he published the first Surrealist Manifesto. His big trick was automatic writing. You write fast, never stop, never fix a thing. Painters like Dalí and René Magritte signed on, and by the 1930s the whole thing was a craze.
Why weird makes us laugh
Your brain guesses what’s coming next, all day long. When a guess fails and nothing bad happens, you laugh. That’s the short version of what humor researchers call incongruity.
A soft clock breaks the guess. So does a painted pipe that argues with you. And there’s a second pleasure, which is trying to figure it out. Why is that apple hovering in front of his face? You won’t get an answer. Somehow that’s half the fun.
The funniest surrealists
Dalí first. His Persistence of Memory, from 1931, is tiny, about as big as a sheet of paper, which surprises almost everyone who sees it at the Museum of Modern Art. The story goes that melting Camembert gave him the idea. He also built a telephone with a plaster lobster for a handset. And in 1936 he gave a lecture in London wearing a full diving helmet, started running out of air, and had to be rescued. The crowd thought it was part of the show. Honestly, it kind of was.
Magritte was the opposite. Quiet Belgian, bowler hat, dark suit, looked like he sold insurance. His painting The Treachery of Images shows a perfectly drawn pipe with a caption saying it isn’t one. He’s right, you can’t smoke it. In the painting “Golconda” suited men in black bowler hats float in the air over a rows of houses like falling raindrops and not one of them looks out of place.
The artist Meret Oppenheim once covered a cup, saucer and spoon in fur back in 1936. The story goes that Pablo Picasso made a joke statement at a cool Paris café that you could cover any object in fur and she said, Even this cup and saucer? Then she went off and made it real.
Leonora Carrington wrote stories even stranger than her paintings. In one, a girl who hates parties sends a hyena from the zoo in her place. The disguise isn’t great.
Surrealism is everywhere now
Memes, mostly. A potato giving life advice. A cat in a business suit. A sandwich photo with a caption about taxes. Cartoons lean on dream logic too, with clouds that work as lawyers and dogs that pay rent. Ad people love it because a weird picture stops your thumb mid scroll.
Try fun surrealism yourself
Skip the talent. Bring the silliness.
Exquisite corpse is the classic. Fold a sheet of paper in three. One person draws a head, folds it over, hands it on. The next draws a body, the next draws legs. Unfold it and meet your creature. The Paris surrealists made this game up, and the name comes from the first sentence their word version produced.
Automatic writing takes five minutes. Set a timer, write nonstop, cross out nothing. Most of it’s junk. Then you’ll hit something like “the moon was a tired lemon nobody wanted to peel,” and you’ll want to frame it.
Try an object mashup. Pick two random things, say a lighthouse and a sandwich. What does the combo do? Who buys it? Mine guides hungry ships to lunch.
And keep a dream journal by the bed. Write the second you wake up, because dreams vanish within minutes.
Why bother being weird?
Mixing ideas that don’t belong together is how most new ideas show up. Laughing at nonsense also gives your head a break from real worries. And it’s oddly comforting to learn that everybody carries around a pile of strange thoughts. The interesting people just let some out.
So next time you wonder if your umbrella might secretly be a bat, write it down. Every surreal painting started with a thought like that, and someone who didn’t talk themselves out of it.
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