Surrealism has been both helped and hampered by the legacy of Salvador Dali, says Elliott H King, 47.

An associate professor of art history at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, King has been studying the artist since 1998. “What drew me to him first was his writing. I read his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, and was struck by his humour.”

In that 1942 book, Dali writes that he once made cocktails for himself at the bar of the Ritz in Madrid, using his blood as an ingredient. He says a locust in a hotel room once so distressed him, he nearly threw himself out of a window.

Surrealism has been both helped and hampered by the legacy of Salvador Dali, says Elliott H King, 47.

An associate professor of art history at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, King has been studying the artist since 1998. “What drew me to him first was his writing. I read his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, and was struck by his humour.”

In that 1942 book, Dali writes that he once made cocktails for himself at the bar of the Ritz in Madrid, using his blood as an ingredient. He says a locust in a hotel room once so distressed him, he nearly threw himself out of a window.

The book is an impossible collection of truth, myth and flights of fancy; an artist laughing madly at himself and the world.

In these ways, in his paintings, his writings and his life, Dali embodied surrealism. But, King says, his insistence that surrealist expression remain free of political responsibility makes Dali a “poor example of the philosophy of the movement”.

Dali’s barren landscapes and fever-dream-like distorted objects have come to define surrealism in the popular imagination. “It’s how people define surrealism — something that seems familiar and strange at the same time. His influence is pervasive. But his work doesn’t encompass surrealism’s full breadth,” King says.

The movement is, for one thing, a distinctly political one, and in this lies part of its current appeal.

“Even before we think about Dali, I’d like to say that surrealism is a living movement that rides against totalitarianism and fascism. It is pro-environmentalist and pro-indigenous rights. There’s a lot of surrealism today that has not been derived from Dali, and is inspired directly by the movement. There are a lot of contemporary writers who have taken up notions of surrealism to express gender identity, race, liberation and freedom from certain pre-existing structures. In this way, surrealism has a legacy that’s quite distinct from what Dali left behind,” King says.

In the work of writers such as Rikki Ducornet and the late JG Ballard, the movement lives on.

In Ducornet’s 1993 novel, The Jade Cabinet, for instance, a beautiful woman rendered speechless by her father is then traded, by him, for a beautiful piece of jade.

In her Phosphor in dreamland (1995), a writer revisits the 17th century history of a Caribbean island, to explore eternal bonds between “power and madness, nature and its exploitation, pornography and art, innocence and depravity”. She describes herself as being influenced by the surrealists Alfred Jarry and Max Ernst.

Meanwhile, Ballard’s Crash (1973) follows a group of car-crash fetishists. And in High-Rise (1975), he traces the slow death of a once-luxurious apartment building, as its residents begin to attack one another. He describes himself as being influenced by Rene Magritte, Ernst and Dali.

“What feels particularly promising is how the movement continues to travel the world. Its global reach fascinates me,” King says. “While often associated with France and the US, surrealism has adapted to local cultures around the world.”

In Japan, there are the artists Erina Matsui (a 40-year-old known for her surreal self-portraits) and Naoto Hattori (a 50-year-old who seeks to express the chaotic and surreal in nature). In Chile, Guillermo Lorca García-Huidobro, 41, blends elements of the Baroque and Renaissance with surreal distortion.

“The movement lives on in the surrealist exhibitions being held around the world.”

The idea of a distorted reality that borders on and then crosses over into the uncanny is a way for people to process, explore — and escape — the difficult realities of today, King says. “Perhaps that is why the movement has remained so relevant.”