Man Ray, Daring Gift (Cadeau Audace), 1921/1974. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

Graham Spicer survives a brush with the subconscious to emerge exhausted, but inspired, from the V&A’s Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, running until July 22 2007.

Zippers for eyes, an armchair with real arms, lobster telephones and an iron covered with nails: it has to be the strange world of the Surrealists.

London’s V&A is staging the most far-reaching exhibition on the movement for almost 40 years and the first to focus on its relationship with design.

As such it has a truly huge remit, and is staggeringly comprehensive, bringing together some 300 items into eight packed rooms.

Salvador Dali, Aphrodisiac Jacket (Veston Aphrodisiaque), 1936/1967. Seghers-Van de Velde Gallery, Antwerp-Ostend Belgium © Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, DACS, London 2007

The term Surrealism was coined in 1917 by art critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire. It started as a radical and politically charged movement, born out of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and strove to challenge and change people’s perceptions of the world.

It often used ‘automatic’ techniques, like taking random impressions from natural objects such as wood, to draw art from the subconscious, and was preoccupied with exploring dreams and the irrational. As Salvador Dalí, its most famous exponent, quipped: Surrealism aimed 'to make the fantastical real’.

During the late 1920s and 1930s Surrealism branched into design, theatre, film, fashion and advertising. In creating objects that were traditionally commercial in nature it attracted both criticism and a wider appreciation.

Meret Oppenheim, Table with Bird's Legs, 1939. Private Collection. © DACS 2006

The ballet was one of the first areas outside of fine art to be influenced by Surrealism. On entering the exhibition you are confronted by a mock stage set from Le Bal, first staged in 1929, containing Giorgio de Chirico’s costumes, which transformed the dancers into animated architectural models.

Other early leading Surrealists Joan Miro and Max Ernst were commissioned to produce sets for a 1926 Paris production of Romeo and Juliet, which led to fierce criticism from a group led by André Breton who deplored the movement’s dalliance with the commercial world of the stage.

This apparent contradiction between Surrealism’s lofty manifesto and its ready embrace of commercial pressures would follow the movement through the years.

Although the first Surrealist objects were intended as critiques of consumerism, the artists were quick to see their commercial worth and early Surrealist exhibitions in Paris, like the 1936 Exposition Surréalist d’Objets at the Gallerie Charles Ratton, provided a foretaste of things to come.

Eugene Berman Wardrobe, 1937. © V&A Images

Marcel Jean’s The Spectre of Gardenia is a cast of a woman’s head with zippers for eyes; Man Ray’s Daring Gift is an iron studded with nails, both classic Surrealist objects.

Dalí’s Aphrodisiac Jacket (described by the artist as a ‘machine for thinking’) is similarly iconic – covered with glasses and placed next to a bottle of crème de menthe, visitors were encouraged to top them up and take a drink through the supplied straws, making the viewer an integral part of the artwork.

The Gallerie Drouin exhibition in 1939 showed how the Surrealists had embraced the creation of actually usable objects like furniture, albeit optically challenging wardrobes, a bird’s leg table and a corset chair.

Rene Magritte L'Avenir des statues (The Future of Statues), 1937. Tate Gallery, London (c) ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007

The domestic interior was indeed to become a popular Surrealist project, where the preoccupation with Freudian dream analysis and sexual meaning could run riot.

Some of the best-known Surrealist artworks fall into this category, along with many lesser-known curiosities and intriguing connections.

One of Dalí’s Mae West Lips Sofas and two of his Lobster Telephones are displayed next to an Arm Chair (with ‘real’ arms) and other objects he created for Edward James, a British millionaire who was one of Surrealism’s greatest patrons.

Isamu Noguchi 'Cloud' sofa IN-70 and Footstool, 1948. Milwaukee Art Museum © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum/ ARS

Monkton, James’s Sussex home, was one of the few Surrealist architectural projects of the 1930s, and while Dalí’s ambition of creating a room there which ‘pulsated like the stomach of a sick dog’ was not realised, it certainly came close.

René Magritte’s 1937 The Future of Statues is also displayed, a cast of Napoleon’s death mask painted as a cloudy blue sky, which was also to prove hugely influential.

Nature was, in fact, one of the key Surrealist themes, with natural forms explored because of their symbolism and structural beauty.

Salvador Dali, Ruby Lips brooch, 1949. Primavera Gallery, New York © Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, DACS, London 2007

A huge array of these biomorphically-inspired objects are displayed, from the organic jewellery of artists like Alexander Calder and Jean Arp, to Isamu Noguchi’s Cloud Form Sofa and Footstool.

Noguchi’s work exemplifies the American contribution to biomorphic Surrealism from the 1940s and 50s, as do works like Carlo Mollino’s Hoof Chair and his tables with their bone-like systems of support.

Tapestries, ceramics and printed fabrics vie for your attention next to works like Dali’s Ruby Lips brooch – what else but real rubies for the ruby-red lips and real pearls for its pearly teeth?

Elsa Schiaparelli, Tear Illusion Dress, 1938 © Schiaparelli France SAS. Photo: Richard Davis

Other stand-out works include Alexander Calder’s fantastic metal Bedhead, created for American art collector Peggy Guggenheim, and the walk-through scale model of the Surrealist Gallery commissioned for her New York Art of This Century Gallery in 1942.

If, after all this, you thought that there could be no more to see, you are confronted with the last but largest room, concentrating on Surrealism’s obsession with the body.

The adoption of Surrealist themes into clothing helped its commercialisation and led to it being eagerly taken up in advertising and shop window displays.

Freudian theories were used to explore the sexual symbolism of mannequins, women’s hats and the fetishism of shoes and fur. While to modern minds Elsa Schiaparelli’s Monkey Fur Clothes push the boundaries of what is acceptable, they also blur the line between man and animal, by producing clothing out of our closet animal relative.

Frederick Kiesler, Art of This Century,. Surrealist Gallery (Model). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997. Photo: Richard Waite

Other Surrealist clothing, such as magnificent dresses by Schiaparelli, Gilbert Adrian and Charles James are more palatable at first glance, but contain darker meanings just waiting to be discovered.

As I mentioned, this is a huge exhibition. It would be easy to miss some of its wonderful treats, like the story of Modernist architect Le Corbusier’s brush with Surrealism and the link between chess grandmaster George Koltanowski and the movement.

Although to do this exhibition justice may leave you exhausted, it contains such a range of stunning and surprising objects that it's well worth the effort.

On leaving the darkened rooms and stepping into the obligatory gift shop, the range, and evident popularity, of the merchandise on offer shows how deeply Surrealist design has embedded itself into the mainstream.