by Natalie Bennett

When Andre Breton and Louis Aragon led the disruption of the 1926 Paris premiere of the Romeo and Juliet for which the sets had been designed by Max Ernst and Joan Miro, they were complaining about selling out. “It is inadmissable that ideas should be at the behest of money,” their leaflet read: they wanted to keep the ideal that surrealism was essentially subversive.

It is another surrealist set, Giorgio de Chirico’s for the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo’s Le Bal of 1929, that opens the Surreal Things exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and it seems, in this room, that art and commerce can live together, can both flourish. In this production the dancers were styled as walls, columns, architraves, statues, that came alive for one night, and the imaginative leap is exciting, enrapturing, helped by the display of this static set in three dimensions, so that the visitor can look in from the wings, and from back stage.

Yet as the exhibition progresses it is clear that the surrealists did lose something, perhaps everything, in their eagerness to be co-opted by the seductions of wealth. A Man Ray photo of a model in a design-name evening gown reclining in Oscar Dominguez’s “Brouette” (a wheelbarrow lined with plush red satin) doesn’t so much scream “sell-out” as ooze it from every tiny, manicured pore.

And while in the first couple of rooms of this show there are stand-out, stop-you-in-your-tracks powerful objects – notably Man Ray’s Cadeau Audace, the simple flat iron studded with fierce nails as shocking as ever, despite its familiarity — after that you are progressing through room after room of mildly amusing, expensive objects made for rich people’s games – can a seriously expensive designer evening gown really be “surrealist”, even if its mere existence can be seen as surreal?

The odd fine Magritte, such as “La reproduction interdite” are the only things that invite more than an amused glance.

Then there are the disturbing sexual politics of the movement. In the room entitled “the illusory interior” there are some powerful statements from women artists drawing chiefly on the Freudian tradition. “Natural Law” by Toyen (Marie Cerminova) imagines the unconscious as a series of dangerous rooms – in one an exploding filing cabinet, in another a bleak forest of dead trees lined up like gravestones. Dorothea Tanning’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” of 1943 has a nightmarish nursery corridor with a dead sunflower and spaced-out girl children. This is the home as a space that’s destructive, deadly even, for women.

But as Germaine Greer has pointed out, the works of the male Surrealists artists, with their focus on, and exploitation of, the idea of the muse, and the tortured female body, are seriously disturbing. Much in the room the V&A has labelled “Displaying the Body” is disturbingly 21st-century in its exploitative, fetishist feel.

It seems entirely fitting that the exhibition itself has been commercially appropriated; Selfridges has taken it as the inspiration for a exhibition continues at the V&A until July 22. Entry £9 downwards. Other views: Wall Street Journal, the Telegraph, and The Times.