From 1924 the German Max Ernst, the Frenchman Jean Arp, and the American painter and photographer Man Ray were among its members. They were joined for a short time about 1925 by the Frenchman Andr Masson and the Spaniard Joan Miro, who remained members for some time but were too individualistic as painters to submit to the strong leadership of Andr Breton, who exercised final authority over the movement. Later members of the group included the French-American Yves Tanguy, the Belgian Rene Magritte, and the Swiss Alberto Giacometti. The Catalan painter Salvador Dali joined the surrealist movement in 1930 but was later denounced by most surrealists because he was held to be more interested in commercializing his art than in surrealist ideas. Although for a time he was the most talked-about member of the group, his work is so idiosyncratic as to be only partially typical of surrealism.
Surrealist painting exhibits great variety of content and technique.
That of Dal , for example, consists of more or less a direct and photographic transcription of dreams, deriving its inspiration from the earlier dreamlike paintings of de Chirico. Arp's sculptures are large, smooth, abstract forms, and Mir , a formal member of the group for a short time only, employed, as a rule, fantastic shapes, which included deliberate adaptations of children's art and which also had something in common with the designs used by the native Catalan artists to decorate pottery. The Russian-American painter Pavel Tchelichew, while not a member of the surrealists, created surrealist images in his paintings as well as in his numerous ballet designs. An American offshoot of the surrealist movement is the group of artists known as the magic realists, under the leadership of the painter Paul Cadmus. The group also includes George Tooker, Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, Philip Evergood, Peter Blume, and Louis Guglielmi.