What if a book were not simply something to read, but something to encounter—to touch with the imagination, question, rearrange and even find unsettling? For Surrealist artists and writers, the book offered precisely this possibility. Its pages could contain poetry and images, but its physical form could also become an artwork in its own right: a place where language, dreams, chance and material experimentation collided.
At The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors explores this radical approach to the printed object. On view from October 4, 2026, through January 23, 2027, the exhibition brings together rare artists’ books from the Helen and Sam Zell Collection, many being presented at MoMA for the first time. The works reveal how Surrealism extended beyond painting and sculpture into the intimate, portable world of books. <Cite refs={[“turn972420search0″,”turn972420search1”]}/>
Featuring artists and writers including André Breton, Claude Cahun, Salvador Dalí, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Toyen and Unica Zürn, the exhibition follows the development of Surrealist publishing from its foundational years in the 1920s through the movement’s later influence in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. <Cite refs={[“turn972420search1″,”turn972420search4”]}/>
When the Book Becomes an Artwork
The traditional book has a familiar structure: a cover, a sequence of pages and a text that unfolds as the reader moves from beginning to end. Surrealist artists challenged the assumptions behind that format. They experimented with unusual papers, inserted images and objects, handmade elements, elaborate bindings and unexpected combinations of words and photographs.
In these works, the physical book is not merely packaging for its contents. It participates in their meaning. A cover can create mystery before a page is opened; a material can introduce a sense of danger or fragility; a collage can disrupt the authority of a sentence or the logic of a conventional image.
MoMA’s presentation emphasizes this diversity, including special editions enhanced with supplementary materials, unique maquettes, sketchbooks filled with fantastical drawings and sculptural bindings that turn books into hybrid objects. <Cite refs={[“turn972420search0″,”turn972420search1”]}/>
The result is an exhibition that asks visitors to reconsider what reading means. A book may be understood through its words, but it can also communicate through texture, construction, sequence and surprise. The experience becomes partly literary and partly visual, with the reader serving as an active participant in discovering how the object works.
A Movement Built on the Unexpected
Surrealism emerged in the early twentieth century as artists and writers sought alternatives to conventional rational thought and established cultural values. André Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism became a foundational statement of the movement, which embraced dreams, chance, unexpected associations and explorations of the unconscious.
Books offered an especially flexible platform for these ambitions. Unlike a monumental public artwork, a book could be held close, opened privately and revisited. Its pages could establish a sequence while simultaneously undermining the reader’s expectations. Poetry could meet photography; a familiar image could be altered through collage; a binding could transform an ordinary volume into an enigmatic object.
The exhibition’s title, Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors, suggests the movement’s fascination with unstable relationships between reality, reflection and possibility. A mirror may appear to reproduce the world, but it also reverses it and raises questions about what lies beyond the visible surface. Surrealist books operate in a similar space: they use recognizable forms to lead readers toward unfamiliar connections.
Rather than offering a single definition of Surrealism, the exhibition demonstrates how its ideas could take shape through multiple artistic practices.
Shattered Glass, Photomontage and Inventive Bindings
Among the exhibition’s striking examples is Défense de savoir (Knowledge Forbidden), written by Paul Éluard and featuring a drawing by Giorgio de Chirico. Originally published in 1928, the volume was rebound in 1936 by Georges Hugnet and Louis Christy. Its bespoke binding incorporates sheets of shattered lead glass, making the outside of the book as conceptually charged as the material within. <Cite refs={[“turn972420search1”]}/>
The work complicates the ordinary act of opening a book. A binding is usually designed to protect its contents and make them accessible. Here, glass introduces a different association: the surface becomes fragile, reflective and potentially threatening. The object asks the viewer to consider the relationship between access and restriction, knowledge and concealment.
Another important example is Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s Aveux non avenus (Canceled Confessions), published in 1930. The volume combines Cahun’s writing with photomontages, bringing images and text together in ways that unsettle the idea of a stable, unified self. <Cite refs={[“turn972420search1”]}/>
Cahun’s broader artistic practice questioned identity and the ways it is constructed and presented. Within a book, photomontage makes this inquiry particularly effective: images can be cut apart, rearranged and placed into new relationships, exposing how representation can be manipulated rather than simply accepted.
These works show that the Surrealist book was not a decorative variation on conventional publishing. It was a site for experimentation with perception, meaning and the authority of the image.
Dalí, Toyen and the Unconventional Page
Salvador Dalí’s involvement in Surrealist books demonstrates how artists could extend their visual imaginations into printed and bound formats. The exhibition includes L’immaculée Conception (The Immaculate Conception), a book by Breton and Éluard with Dalí’s artistic contribution, alongside an elaborate later rebinding that incorporates additional drawings and documentary materials. <Cite refs={[“turn972420search1”]}/>
Such examples blur the line between publication and collection. A volume can gather text, original or reproduced imagery, handwritten additions and a specially designed cover into a single object. Its meaning is shaped not only by what was originally printed but also by the interventions that transform it.
The work of Toyen and Jindřich Heisler offers another perspective. Their Z kasemat spánku: Realisované básně (From the Strongholds of Sleep: Realized Poems), published in 1940, combines poetry with photographic images of staged environments. The photographs, mounted on metallic paper, turn the book into a sequence of carefully constructed visual encounters. <Cite refs={[“turn972420search1”]}/>
Here, the page becomes a space in which dreamlike imagery can be organized and experienced. The book retains a sequence, but its photographs also invite the reader to pause, interpret and make connections beyond the literal text.
Unica Zürn and the Intimacy of the Handmade
The exhibition also features Unica Zürn’s Orakel und Spektakel, IV. Buch: Anagramme und Zeichnungen (Oracle and Spectacle, Book IV: Anagrams and Drawings), dated 1960. This unusual work combines writing and drawing with torn and pasted papers, dried plant material, feathers, envelopes, a playing card and thread-related objects. <Cite refs={[“turn972420search0″,”turn972420search1”]}/>
Its materials resist the idea of the book as a uniform, industrially produced object. The pages become a record of decisions, associations and physical interventions. The handmade elements make the volume feel closer to an intimate archive or a private imaginative world than to a conventional publication.
Zürn’s combination of anagrams and drawings also brings language into a state of instability. An anagram rearranges the letters of a word to create a different configuration, revealing how familiar language can produce unexpected results when its elements are shifted. In a Surrealist context, this process offers a compact model of creative transformation: meaning is not necessarily fixed, and chance or rearrangement can open new possibilities.
Why These Books Still Matter
The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors offers a timely reminder that artistic experimentation does not always require a monumental canvas or a large gallery installation. Sometimes it begins with a page, a sentence, a photograph or the decision to alter a book’s binding.
The exhibition also expands the story of modern art by showing how ideas circulated across media. Surrealism was not limited to a recognizable style of painting. It developed through collaboration among artists, writers, photographers and designers, with publishing serving as a meeting point for different forms of creative practice.
For contemporary viewers accustomed to moving rapidly between images and text on digital screens, these handmade books offer a different kind of encounter. Their material details reward attention; their sequences encourage slower looking; their unexpected combinations resist instant interpretation.
At MoMA, the book emerges as both an object and an invitation—to question what seems familiar, to follow an unexpected association and to allow imagination to disrupt ordinary logic. In the Surrealist universe, opening a book can mean opening a door onto another way of seeing.
