This exhibit originated at London's Victoria and Albert Museum (V & A). On its arrival here, changes were made to include works from North American collections, including pieces from the AGO's own extensive Surrealism treasures. The show is well organized, and offers a clear view of the various aspects of Surrealism through the decades in which it had a strong presence. Some may even argue that it still affects films, even architecture to this day. This influence, however, surely operates at a subconscious level on part of the creator.

The poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire coined the word, surrealism, in 1917 in reference to a ballet, Parade, by Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau, and his own play, Les mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias). Having died in 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic, he was never part of the Surrealists, who gathered around André Breton, ex-physician and psychiatrist turned poet and surrealist theorist. This absolute autocrat, who had taken over Apollinaire's term, and founded the new art movement, decided who was in and who was out of the Surrealist circle as the years progressed. He encouraged rejection of bourgeois values among his followers and a close to anarchic behavior among some of his adherents.

At first Surrealism centered more around literature as a statement by Breton reveals. "In literature, I am successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most." He liked Vaché's rebellious nature and anti-bourgeois stance expressed through admiration of various controversial writers, especially Alfred Jarry. Breton at first defined Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism", a definition that proved capable of significant expansion in the decades that followed.

This theorist also made this rather ominous statement: "The simplest surrealist act consists in going in the street with revolvers in your fist and shooting blindly into the crowd as much as possible. Anyone who has never felt the desire to deal thus with the current wretched principle of humiliation and stultification clearly belongs in this crowd himself with his belly at bullet height."

Breton wrote his First Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, followed by a Second Manifesto in 1929, which he supervised, but did not write himself. Neither are easy to read, but the second manifesto veers considerably away from the original idea of Surrealism, and who is or is not a Surrealist. What is clear is that Breton had an inclination toward pseudo-scientific ideas that later proved unworkable despite his high-sounding Bureau for Surrealist Research founded shortly before publication of the First Manifesto. Surrealism, supposedly creating words and images through the subconscious, eventually turned more into the art of symbolism, and became exceedingly manneristic, though some would argue against that. This symbolism, unfortunately often was a very personal one created in the mind of the artist or writer. This often left the reader or viewer puzzled as to the meaning of the work.

V & A curator, Ghislaine Wood, came to create this show after she had an "epiphany" while looking at some Surrialist works stored in the basement of the museum. Collecting a variety of elements, she put together a successful and comprehensive exhibit, a first of its kind on Surrealism. It showed in London in 2007 and then in Rotterdam and Bilbao to an estimated 800,000 visitors. For now, the AGO is the only North American venue, though the Dallas Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts may eventually carry it. Wood was, among others, the successful curator of the Art Deco 1910-1939 exhibition on display at the Royal Ontario Museum in early 2004.

"Born of the political ideology of Karl Marx and the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, Surrealism is arguably the most influential avant-garde art movement of the twentieth century," Wood stated in an essay about the Surreal Things exhibit. For most people this may be a rather prejudiced statement. On a conscious level the average individual would have been far more exposed to Art Deco during the 1920s and 30s, remnants of which can still be found all around us.

The disparate nature of the adherents of Surrealism, most of whom were left-leaning, eventually led the group to reject Communism, and Breton was thrown out of the French Communist Party in the late 1930s. An obvious reason for this rejection is that Surrealists preferred individuality to communality.

For most of us, Salvador Dali is the epitome of a Surrealist, though among purists he eventually fell into disrepute. Besides, unlike his colleagues, he appeared to have a leaning toward fascism. His identity in the general public is fully established. Who has not seen his melting clocks, or his mustachioed Mona Lisa? He had no objection to bringing this art form to other applications, such as commercial, theater and interior design, to fashion, jewelry and even furniture. But he was not the first to venture outside the accepted, non-commercial application of Surrealism. Serge Diaghilev commissioned Max Ernst and Joan Miró to design sets for a production of Romeo and Juliet for Les Ballets Russes in 1926. Astonishingly, Breton and members of his group disrupted the Paris premiere by shouting and blowing whistles, while distributing leaflets that among others stated that "it is inadmissible that ideas should be at the behest of money."

Breton, being a rather arbitrary autocrat, objected to Miró's and Ernst's activities, yet he failed to do so when Man Ray fully exploited the commercial aspects of Surrealism in fashion photography as early as 1925. Breton also collaborated in the design of tapestries in 1924-5.

Surreal Things is divided into five sections, beginning with Protest: The Ballet. As mentioned above, Ballets Russes offered avant-garde artists a chance to expand their ideas into new fields. Besides Miró and Ernst, André Masson also worked in this area. He, by the way, was one of the artists ejected from the Surrealists by Breton.

Next is featured The Surreal Object, which shows how a shift took place away from the automatic process so championed by Breton toward constructed objects. Often bizarre in nature, they alluded to subjective dreams and desires. While meant to be a criticism of the consumer culture, the objects encouraged the assimilation of surreal ideas into the mainstream. They also sometimes expressed involuntary humor despite aiming at a higher plane.

The Illusory Interior presents a different kind of outlandish images and objects created by René Magritte and Dali which were associated with the domestic environment. There are the interiors for Edward James's Monkton House which include dishes and Dali's Aphrodisiac Telephone with a lobster as a handle, a Mae West Lips sofa, and a variety of objects created for other sources such as an Anthropomorphic Wardrobe by Léonor Fini, and a red satin-covered wheelbarrow by Oscar Dominguez.

Next comes Nature Made Strange. This section displays how the Surrealists borrowed from a wide source, including Art Nouveau, 19^th-century natural science, and what was then new: micro-photography and film. For the uninitiated viewer, the relationship to Art Nouveau, for an example, may seem strange as this genre of art was obviously very far removed from the original Surrealist aim of pure psychic automatism as envisioned by Breton.

Finally, there is Displaying the Body. It offers up a wide range of objects that shows off the Surrealists's preoccupation with the female body, through mannequins, fashion accessories and dresses designed by Elsa Schiaparelli in collaboration with Dali and Jean Cocteau. On viewing the dresses, they seem very much part of the era and very closely related to Art Decon design, though not quite as elegant. Part of the display is Schiaparelli's Paris store front window which had been designed in the form of a cage. Schiaparelli also worked with Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet, Meret Oppenheim, Fini, and Alberto Giacometti. The latter, like Dali, is perhaps one of the more well known proponents of Surrealism.

The exhibit includes several posters created in 1939 as advertisements for Shell by Hans Schleger. These posters, by the well-known designer, who signed his work with Zero, had a long and influential career. Yet, these posters lack the clarity of his better known works for the London Underground and other British and US companies.

The exhibit clearly reveals through a variety of artists that at one stage or another, Surrealism had a preoccupation with fetishism, whether in paintings, film, sculpture, jewelry, or fashion items. This includes Oppenheim's Fur Breakfast which consists of a cup and saucer, plus a spoon covered in fur. It supposedly alludes to Edgar Manet's controversial painting Le déjeuner sur l'herge, but also implies an association with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 1870 novel, Venus in Furs. This novel, of course, gave us the expression, masochism. Here is an example of the symbolism that can really only be understood if the viewer is aware of the nature of either of the other works to which it supposedly alludes. Venus in Furs, by the way, is the only Sacher-Masoch novel translated into English, although today most likely few have read it.