How Surrealist artists transformed books from containers of ideas into immersive objects of art, imagination, and revolt
A book can be read. It can also be touched, opened, altered, collected—and, in the hands of the Surrealists, transformed into something closer to a dream.
This fall, The Museum of Modern Art in New York turns its attention to that radical transformation with The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors, an exhibition devoted to the book as an artwork in its own right. On view October 4, 2026, through January 23, 2027, on MoMA’s third floor, the exhibition brings together rare artists’ books from the Helen and Sam Zell Collection, many of them appearing at the museum for the first time.
Rather than treating books simply as vessels for paintings, poems, or ideas, the exhibition reveals how Surrealist artists and writers turned the entire object—its pages, paper, binding, typography, images, and physical construction—into a site for experimentation.
The result is a different way of thinking about what a book can be.
When the Book Becomes the Artwork
Surrealism emerged in the 1920s around an interest in dreams, the unconscious, chance, and forms of thought outside conventional rational control. André Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism became one of the movement’s foundational texts, establishing an artistic and literary practice centered on accessing the imagination through unconventional methods.
The book was therefore an unusually powerful medium.
It could carry a manifesto, a poem, a photograph, a collage, or a drawing—but it could also become a physical encounter with the irrational. Pages could conceal images. Materials could disrupt reading. Bindings could become sculptural. Collaboration between writers, artists, photographers, and bookbinders could produce objects that existed somewhere between literature and visual art.
MoMA describes these Surrealist books as provocative new art forms—objects intended to open a passage toward what the artists called the “marvelous.”
A Collection of Unusual Objects
At the center of the exhibition is the Helen and Sam Zell Collection, a major gift of rare artists’ books being presented at MoMA for the first time in this exhibition. The selection includes special editions printed on unusual papers, books incorporating additional materials, unique maquettes and sketchbooks, and elaborate sculptural bindings.
Among the artists represented are André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Claude Cahun, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Toyen, Georges Hugnet, and Unica Zürn.
One of the exhibition’s striking examples is Giorgio de Chirico and Paul Éluard’s Défense de savoir (Knowledge Forbidden), published in 1928 and rebound in 1936. Its later binding incorporates sheets of shattered lead glass, turning what might ordinarily be a protective cover into a visually and materially confrontational surface.
Another example is André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme; Poisson soluble (Surrealist Manifesto; Soluble Fish), published in 1924 and later rebound with additional manuscripts and a collage poem, together with a bespoke nickel-silver binding by Paul Bonet.
The object is no longer merely a record of an artistic movement. The object itself becomes part of the movement’s argument.
Dalí, Cahun, Toyen, and the Collaborative Page
Salvador Dalí’s presence demonstrates the degree to which image and text could become inseparable. His L’immaculée Conception (The Immaculate Conception), created with Breton and Éluard, combines printed text with Dalí’s graphic work and was later given an elaborate bespoke rebinding incorporating photographic and decorative elements.
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s Aveux non avenus (Canceled Confessions), published in 1930, similarly demonstrates the Surrealist fascination with photomontage. The book contains reproductions of photographic compositions alongside text, transforming the sequence of pages into an extended visual and psychological environment.
Toyen and Jindřich Heisler’s Z kasemat spánku: Realisované básně (From the Strongholds of Sleep: Realized Poems), published in Prague in 1940, pushes the relationship between photography, poetry, and constructed imagery further. Its gelatin silver prints document staged environments created by Toyen and Heisler.
The book becomes a collaborative stage—one in which no single medium necessarily dominates.
Beyond the Page
The exhibition also demonstrates that Surrealist bookmaking was not confined to the movement’s earliest years.
MoMA traces the history of these objects from their foundational role in the 1920s through experiments of the 1930s and ’40s and into the 1950s and ’60s, showing how the Surrealist sensibility continued to appear in books long after the movement’s formative period.
Unica Zürn’s Orakel und Spektakel, IV. Buch: Anagramme und Zeichnungen (Oracle and Spectacle, Book IV: Anagrams and Drawings) from 1960 is an especially tactile example. The work incorporates ink, colored ink, pencil, torn and pasted paper, dried plant material, feathers, envelopes, a playing card, and thread-related materials.
Here, the traditional distinction between “page” and “object” almost disappears.
The book has become something to encounter physically as much as intellectually.
New York and the History of the Surrealist Book
For New York, the exhibition also resonates with MoMA’s long-standing commitment to Surrealist publications.
The museum’s Library has extensive holdings related to the movement, including the Éluard-Dausse Collection of nearly 700 books, magazines, pamphlets, and ephemera. Its Surrealist holdings include manifestos, journals, poetry, automatic writing, artists’ publications, and other primary materials documenting the movement’s development.
That history makes the exhibition more than a display of rare bibliographic treasures. It connects physical books with the broader infrastructure through which Surrealism circulated its ideas.
Before social media, before digital publishing, the printed page could itself become an instrument of cultural disruption.
The Book as a Contemporary Art Question
Seen from today’s perspective, The Surrealist Book also raises a question that extends beyond Surrealism: What happens when the medium itself becomes the message?
Contemporary artists routinely move between photography, sculpture, installation, film, digital media, and publishing. Artists’ books continue to occupy an unusual position within that ecosystem because they can be simultaneously intimate and public, reproducible and collectible, literary and visual.
The Surrealists understood that tension early.
They recognized that a book did not have to remain passive.
Its physical form could challenge expectations. Its sequence could manipulate perception. Its materials could create surprise. Its images could interrupt language. And its binding could become part of the artwork rather than simply holding the artwork together.
In that sense, the Surrealist book was not simply illustrated literature.
It was an experiment in how an object could change the way a person reads, looks, and imagines.
A Portal Rather Than a Container
The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors ultimately proposes a history of books that refuse to behave like ordinary books.
Across rare editions, manuscripts, photographs, collages, unusual materials, and sculptural bindings, MoMA presents a world in which reading becomes an act of discovery and the physical object becomes part of the narrative.
For a movement devoted to dreams, chance, contradiction, and the marvelous, the book offered an almost perfect laboratory.
You open it expecting words.
What you encounter may be an artwork.
And once the cover becomes part of the experience, the distinction between reading and looking begins to disappear.
Exhibition Details
The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
October 4, 2026–January 23, 2027
MoMA, Floor 3
The exhibition is organized by Jodi Hauptman, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, and Starr Figura, Curator, with Kolleen Ku, Curatorial Assistant, and Emma Kang, Brooke Alexander Fellow, in MoMA’s Department of Drawings and Prints.
MoMA has also published a 272-page exhibition catalogue, The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors, edited by Hauptman and Figura.
