'Surrealism manifesto' takes pride of place in Paris celebration of movement's centenary

The Pompidou Centre in Paris has gathered about 500 Surrealist works from international public and private collections.

Transcript

00:00The soon-to-be-renovated Pompidou Center in Paris is showing a vast retrospective of Surrealist

00:09works to celebrate the 100th birthday of the movement.

00:14About 500 artworks from Picasso to Dali are on show in the exhibition that was first displayed

00:20in Brussels last spring.

00:26Surrealism is in fact the reaction of young people who have been sent to the war when

00:31they were 20 years old at least.

00:34And finally they came back and wanted to destroy the world who was this world, who had driven

00:41the civilization and the humankind to a destruction.

00:45So they wanted to build something completely new.

00:52The retrospective aims to show the scope of the movement, officially dissolved in 1969,

00:58with an emphasis on long-overlooked female artists.

01:05The message of Surrealism is quite simple, it is the apology of poetry.

01:10And what is poetry?

01:12It is a mixture of rationality, of thought and at the same time of imagination, of delirium.

01:18And it is this very simple equation that Surrealism has always repeated.

01:25This expanded exhibition will run until January 13, 2025 in Paris.

01:32It will then tour Spain, Germany and the United States.