Stylogenyin the style of Surrealist Graphics

Avant-garde · 1924–1960 · Western Europe, North America

Surrealist Graphics

Also known as Surrealism, Surrealist collage and photography

Launched by André Breton's 1924 manifesto, Surrealism sought the marvellous in dreams, chance and the unconscious. Its graphic legacy (uncanny collage from old engravings, solarised and cameraless photographs, impossible juxtapositions painted with illusionistic precision) passed through magazines like Minotaure into fashion, advertising and book design on both sides of the Atlantic.

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A distressed, surreal collage combines a large woman's face with a curling seashell, stone staircases, ruined arches, and cliffside buildings above a blue sea. An orange fish floats in the foreground, a tiny person stands on the stairs, and a golden disc hangs among clouds beside the title “The Drift.”
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

01

How it works

  • Juxtapose unrelated objects with illusionistic precision so the impossible looks plausible.
  • Collage old engravings or photographs seamlessly, hiding the joins to make the dream convincing.
  • Manipulate photographs through solarisation, photograms, double exposure and distortion.
  • Stage figures in deep, empty dreamscapes with low horizons and long shadows.
  • Keep typography quiet, classical or hand-written so the image carries the shock.
  • Use chance and automatism (frottage, decalcomania, automatic drawing) to generate forms.

Paris, France; wartime exile in New York

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Rational & objective, Authoritative & institutional, Modular grid, Flat, Diagram & data, Pictogram

Palette

  • #1d1b2e
  • #6f8fb5
  • #d8b77a
  • #a24a2a
  • #efe8d8
  • #2b2b2b

Typefaces

  • Artists' hand-lettered mastheads

    Minotaure covers

  • Didone and Victorian display faces lifted from 19th-century catalogues

  • Magritte's schoolroom cursive

    The Treachery of Images, 1929

Known for

  • André Breton

    Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924

  • Minotaure magazine

    Albert Skira & Tériade, 1933–39

  • Max Ernst

    La Femme 100 têtes, 1929; Une semaine de bonté, 1934

  • Man Ray

    rayographs; Électricité portfolio, 1931

  • René Magritte

  • Salvador Dalí

  • Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore

    Aveux non avenus, 1930

03

Make something in this style

Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Surrealist Graphics’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.

Rule out a choice, read the prompt, or blend in another style: take this brief to Mix styles.

04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleSurrealist Graphics1924–1960 · Western Europe, North America

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Real works

Artefacts in museums, libraries and archives that show the style, linked at their source.

06

Sources

  1. Dawn Ades, Photomontage (Thames & Hudson, 1976)
  2. Rosalind Krauss & Jane Livingston, L'Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism (1985)
  3. Philip B. Meggs & Alston W. Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design

How Stylogeny researches and checks a style: where the facts come from.