In painting and sculpture, the surrealism is one of the main tendencies of the XX century. It claims, as their predecessors in the plastic arts, to such painters as the Italian Paolo Uccello, the poet and British artist William Blake, and to the French Odilon Redon. Presently century they are also admired and sometimes exposed as surrealist certain works of Giorgio of Chirico, of the Russian Marc Chagall, of the Swiss Paul Klee, and of the French Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, as well as of the Spanish Pablo Picasso, although none of them was part of the group. Starting from the year 1924 the German Max Ernst, the French Jean Arp as well as the painter and American photographer Man Ray are included among their members. They united for a short period of time the French André Masson and the Spanish Joan he/she Looked. Both painters were members of the surrealist group but, too individualistic to undergo the dictations of Breton André, they breakawayed in 1925. Later, the franc-American painter Yves Tanguy incorporated, as well as the Belgian René Magritte and the Swiss Alberto Giacometti. The catalan painter Salvador Dalí associated in 1930, but later it was relegated by most of the surrealist artists, since it was more interested in the commercialization of his art than in the ideas of the movement. Although during certain time it was the most renowned artist in the group, their work it was so personal that one of the most representative samples in the surrealismo constitutes.

        The surrealist painting is very varied of contents and technical. Dalí, for example, transcribes its dreams in a way more or less photographic, being inspired by the first stage of the painting of Of Chirico. The sculptures of Arp are big, flat and in an abstract way. Of another part, he/she Looked, formal member of the group during a short stage, represented fantastic forms that included adaptations of infantile drawings. The Russian-American painter Pavel Tchelichew painted squares and also creó numerous scenes for ballets. In the decade of 1940, coinciding with the exile in Spanish artists' Mexico influenced by the surrealismo, as well as the visit of Breton that the country accompanied by Diego Rivera traveled and the Soviet politician Liev Trotski, the movement extended in a relative and limited way among Mexican intellectual circles (sees you Remedies Beach).

        The branch surrealist American is constituted by the well-known group as ‘the magic realists ', under the painting Paul Cadmus's leadership. Sculptor Joseph Cornell began as surrealist, but later it pursued a form of being expressed more individual. A representative collection of the graphic work of the surrealists is in the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MOMA).