Of the hundreds of artworks in the Centre Pompidou’s new Surrealism exhibition, the one that really leaps out at you is Max Ernst’s L’ange du foyer (1937). Painted shortly after the Republicans’ defeat in the Spanish Civil War, it is a monstrous evocation of chaos and destruction. A grotesque giant – more devil than angel – marches through a barren landscape. All flailing claws, booted feet, and toothy beak, it seems to scream as it barrels blindly on. There is no rhyme or reason. It is pure horror – a nightmare, more real than dreams.

Ernst later renamed the painting Le Triomphe du Surréalisme (‘The Triumph of Surrealism’). He meant it ironically – as a bitter comment on the Surrealists’ inability to resist the spread of Fascism across Europe. But there was a grain of truth in it, too. In more ways than one, Ernst’s terrifying creature is an encapsulation of Surrealism itself – its tortured history, its violent obsessions, its confused politics, its strange contradictions. It’s a visual summa of everything this exhibition, marking the centenary of the Surrealist movement, is trying to convey. What really makes it stand out, however, is how perfectly it shows what a monstrosity the exhibition ends up being.

Like Ernst’s monster, Surrealism was the child of war. Although its ‘birth’ was heralded by the publication of André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto in October 1924, it was conceived almost a decade earlier – in a hospital bed in northern France, in the midst of the First World War. Already a promising poet, Breton was then a medical intern, with a fascination for the ideas of Sigmund Freud. One day, a soldier was admitted, badly wounded and suffering from acute shell shock. He was convinced that the war wasn’t real. All the bombs and bullets, all the blood and the screams were just figments of his imagination. It was clearly a psychological response, an elaborate self-defence mechanism triggered by the unconscious. But who was to say that he was wrong? Breton realised that the soldier’s fantasy was just as real to him as the horrors of the frontline. And the combination of both was more real than either. It stood to reason, really. After all, this was just an extreme version of what we all do, every day of our lives. When we experience the world, we don’t experience it as it actually is. Rather, we filter our perceptions through our subconscious. We make ‘sense’ of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch based on what is already inside our heads. Dreams are part of our reality; they shape it just as they are shaped by it. Indeed, at times, they are completely indistinguishable from it. The only difference between the soldier and the rest of us was that he was no longer constrained by reason. And what is reason, when you get down to it, other than an agreement about how the world works?

Breton was intrigued. This called into question everything he had assumed about the nature of reality – and, by extension, the whole purpose of art and literature. And he wasn’t alone. Others were already beginning to think along similar lines. In 1917 the poet Guillaume Apollinaire even coined the word ‘surrealism’ to describe what Breton had sensed. But this nevertheless presented a problem. If a deeper reality was indeed to be found in the meeting of the world and the unconscious, how should you capture it in poetry – let alone art?

At first, it was the war that suggested a solution. So appalling was the carnage that had been unleashed that, for a time, it was all anyone could think about. But for many, what made it all so horrifying was the rationality – the cold, inhuman, inexorable logic – on which the war had been based. In Zurich, then in Berlin and Paris, artists like Francis Picabia and Tristan Tzara therefore refused to have anything more to do with reason. They rejected anything to do with the reasonable, bourgeois world from which the war had emerged: the neat, self-satisfied little paintings, the formalist verses, the galleries, even the very idea of an artistic movement… Instead, they embraced unreason. Calling themselves ‘dada’ – a demonstratively meaningless word – they let their imagination run wild. They embraced the absurd, the performative, the ridiculous: gibberish sound-poems, upturned urinals, drunken lectures… They used materials which no artists would previously have touched: odds and ends they found in the street, newspaper cuttings, even outright rubbish. Anything was fair game.

It couldn’t last. Dadaists competed to be the least conventional, most irrational they could be, but they could not do so without defining what dada was more precisely – that is, more rationally. It collapsed under its own contradictions, and a hail of mutual accusations. Yet it nevertheless showed Breton a way forward. Although he shared the Dadaists’ contempt for the bourgeois rationalism of the machine age, he realised that it wasn’t enough simply to throw convention to the wind. What was needed was to approach the unconscious scientifically, like Freud – to systematically remove all rational constraints, to burrow deeper into mental states, to bring life and art into collision. As he explained in his first Surrealist Manifesto, the goal of ‘Surrealism’ was to achieve ‘psychic automatism’ – to express thought in art without any filter, any rational control, ‘any aesthetic or moral concern’. But to express it meaningfully, nonetheless.

Granted, Breton’s Surrealism was not without its challenges. Precisely because he was a poet – rather than a painter or sculptor – he initially conceived of Surrealism as a predominantly literary enterprise. In fact, the first Manifesto speaks of poetry so much that the visual arts barely get a look in. And the Centre Pompidou’s curators – Didier Ottinger and Marie Sarré – are assiduous in giving this the attention it deserves. Hundreds of Surrealist publications are displayed in cabinets along the sides of each room. Yet there was no intrinsic reason why the scientific study of the unconscious should not be pursued through art, as well – no reason why there should not have been a peinture poésie. His solitary interest, after all, was ‘psychic automatism’. But it was impossible to set down any dream, any unconscious thought, in visual form without at least some deliberation. You had to choose your colours, your canvas, your composition, after all. Even a photograph had to be framed before the shutter could be clicked. An ineradicable kernel of reason always remained. Nor could any artform that was ‘consumed’ d’un seul coup – like painting, drawing, or sculpture – capture the unfolding of a dream in the same way as a poem. This was, in part, why film quickly became the Surrealist medium par excellence. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s film Un Chien Andalou (1929) perfectly captures the unsettling irrationality of dream-like states. But this didn’t mean that graphic arts were impossible. Quite the reverse. Some, like Unica Zürn pioneered a form of automatic drawing, where pieces were begun on the spur of the moment, without any pre-determined plan. Others, such as Giorgio Di Chirico adopted a more nuanced approach. For Di Chirico – who came to Surrealism via Schopenhauer and Nietzsche rather than Dada – it was perfectly possible to translate ‘a host of strange, unknown, and solitary things… into painting’ provided one had a ‘pronounced sensitivity’. As he saw it, the task of the artist was not to reproduce a dream in its entirety, but rather to evoke the feeling of unease summoned by a dream.

This allowed the traditional methods of painting – previously scorned by the Dadaists – to be brought back in. Ernst’s highly finished L’ange du foyer illustrates this beautifully. But it reached its culmination in the work of Salvador Dali. Bursting onto the Surrealist scene with Visage du Grand Masturbateur in 1929 – he had an acute feeling for technique, for style, and, for the material expectations of his buyers. No surprise that one of the main criticisms levelled at him by his fellow Surrealists was that he was more interested in money than in Surrealism itself. Even Breton, one of his greatest champions, drily noted that ‘Salvador Dali’ was an anagram of ‘Avida Dollars’. Dali was certainly not alone – either in his technical sensitivities, or his business sense.

Politics was never far from the surface. Breton’s rejection of bourgeois rationalism – inherited from Dada – also led him to despise not only right-wing parties, but also the very structures of capitalism itself. By 1927, Breton and many of the early Surrealists had joined the French Communists, and over the years which followed, most bitterly opposed the rise of both Fascism and Nazism. Their attacks could, at times, be brutally direct. Victor Brauner’s portrait of Hitler (1934) shows the dictator with a dagger through the eye, a hammer in the ear, and a knife slicing away at his neck. As with Ernst’s ‘angel’, however, a parade of strange, terrifying creatures could be used to express a more nuanced criticism. Gérard Vulliamy’s Le Cheval de Troie (1936-37) – a stark evocation of the fears aroused by the remilitarisation of the Rhineland – endows the Greeks with a hideously Bosch-like quality.

Not that politics was without its difficulties. As the writer Pierre Naville argued, it was not immediately apparent how the ruthless individualism of the Surrealists could be squared with the collectivist impulses of Communism. Louis Aragon, in fact, was so troubled by this tension that, in 1932, he dramatically left the Surrealists to devote himself entirely to the Communist Party. Nor, indeed, was it always easy for Surrealists to accept the rise of Stalin – a point about which the curators are curiously silent. In the early 1930s, Dali famously abandoned Communism and drifted so far to the right that, in 1934, Breton even accused him of supporting Hitler.

There was much more agreement about social mores. All traces of convention were to be stripped away. As Breton wrote, ‘the ideas of family, country, religion’ should be laid waste. Understandably, sex was a major preoccupation – indeed, for some, virtually an obsession. Absolute liberty was their rallying cry – albeit of a deeply heterosexual, even misogynistic nature. Freud was a guiding influence; but it was the Marquis de Sade who captured the imagination. In the room devoted to ‘Les larmes d’Éros’, he is everywhere. He is on full display in Hans Bellmer’s unsettling Poupée (1935-6) and Alberto Giacometti’s abstractedly sodomitical Objet désagréable (1931). There are even hints of him in the pink loincloth, riddled with vagina-like cuts, worn by Ernst’s monster.

From the first, however, Surrealism was a monstrous creation. Part of Breton’s motivation for publishing the first Surrealist Manifesto was to create a clearly defined movement, with himself as the ultimate arbiter of who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out’. Yet almost before the ink was dry, the Surrealists were riven by divisions and quarrels. Breton’s vision, while carefully devised, was heavily criticised. Most controversial was his belief that a deeper reality could be revealed when two completely incompatible ideas were smashed together (summed up in Lautréamont’s aphoristic epithet ‘[b]eautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of sewing machine and an umbrella’). This was openly challenged by Georges Bataille, who favoured a simpler, more visceral focus on man’s basest impulses – and who detested Breton’s pomposity. This only made things worse. It pushed Breton to publish his Second Manifesto, attacking those like André Masson and Michel Leiris who he felt had ‘betrayed’ Surrealist principles. But it had its upsides, too. Precisely because the meaning of Surrealism was disputed, it was constantly evolving. As L’ange du foyer hints, it spread far and wide. Indeed, one of the great strengths of this exhibition is the attention it gives to Surrealism beyond France – especially after Breton’s escape to the United States. There are works by the Belgian René Magritte, the American Ted Joans, the British Reuben Mednikoff, the Romanian Victor Brauner, the Czech Jindřich Štyrský, and dozens of others. Particularly well represented are female artists. Most notable among these is the American-born Dorothea Tanning, whose superbly poised Birthday (1942) is one of the highlights of the entire collection.

What is perhaps most striking about Ernst’s L’ange du foyer is how contemporary it still feels. It illustrates exactly why this exhibition should, by rights, be so very timely. Now, the limits of rationality are more painfully apparent that at any point since the last gasps of Surrealism were heard. Once again, the spectre of a world war haunts us. Authoritarianism is on the rise; social constraints are tightening; and economic inequalities are painfully apparent. Even if this year did not mark the centenary of Breton’s first Manifesto, this would be the perfect moment to revisit Surrealism.

This is precisely where the exhibition falls down. It is, in some ways, far too conscious of Surrealism’s contemporary resonance. The curators have deliberately arranged the spaces to evoke the spirit of the movement, to make it present, to unsettle and confound. Yet despite its extraordinary richness, it is simply incomprehensible. There is no narrative, nothing that would make Surrealism accessible, or even interesting, to non-specialists. After a (deliberately?) disorienting film, notionally presenting the first Manifesto, you are led in a spiral through a series of themes. These seem to have been chosen at random. Some barely make any sense, even on their own terms. There are ‘Forests’, ‘Chimeras’, ‘Melusine’, ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’, and so on. There is even one room devoted entirely to umbrellas and sewing machines – when a single work would surely have been enough to make the point. Into these strange rooms, works are jammed in higgledy-piggledy. There is no indication of chronology, no awareness of how Surrealism developed. There isn’t even much sense of who counts as a Surrealist. Picasso, for example, is shoved in without any comment. Granted, Breton thought he was ‘one of us’, but his association with the movement was slight at best – and he never embraced the concept of ‘psychic automatism’ at all.

In other ways, however, the exhibition is not conscious enough of Surrealism’s value for our own times. Although the curators are desperate to seem transgressive and ‘surreal’, they lack the courage to pull this off successfully. Take Buñuel and Dali’s film Un Chien Andalou. It is laudable that this is shown at all, but the all-important scene, in which the calf’s eye is sliced open with a razor is cut out – as if it is too shocking to us to see. Such squeamishness is not only deeply condescending, but it also robs the film of its point. In kowtowing to contemporary sensitivities and prejudices, it deprives Surrealism of its most essential characteristic: its willingness to confront the world of dreams (or nightmares) and bring it into violent collision with the comfortable assumptions of our daily lives.

This is exactly why Ernst’s L’ange du foyer is such a key piece. For all Ernst’s irony, it is a triumph of Surrealism – an encapsulation of its journey and achievement. Yet as you look around at the others works on show, it only makes you realise what a disaster this exhibition is.

Surrealism is on view until January 13, 2025, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.