New York ? When a group of middle-class artists and writers let loose and dive headlong into their subconscious in search of the very roots of desire, love and sexuality, weird things happen.

A lobster finds itself attached to a telephone. A face sprouts breasts and pubic hair. A well-dressed couple kisses as best they can, lips not touching because their heads are cloaked in fabric.

Lobster

Surrealism, the first major artistic movement to openly explore desire and sexuality, emerged from the writings on dreams by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in the 1920s. The extreme breadth of the movement, its frankness and moments of humor are explored in “Surrealism: Desire Unbound,” a sprawling show that opened Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In what the museum says is the first major exhibit of international surrealism in more than two decades, the show surveys more than 300 works, including paintings, sculptures, photos, films, poems, manuscripts and books by well-known artists such as Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Rene Magritte and Frida Kahlo, as well as less famous artists like Dora Maar and Lee Miller.

Explicitly erotic

Initially organized by the Tate Modern in London, the exhibit remains in New York, its final stop, through May 12. But visitors beware: It is not a show for the shy.

The Surrealists were driven by the notion that love, desire and total freedom of the imagination were the salvation of humanity. The works range from provocative to explicit. In one gallery, a tongue becomes a penis, a head becomes a penis and, elsewhere, a whole body becomes a penis.

However, as fliers from 1924 state in the final gallery: “Si vous aimez l’amour, vous aimerez le surrealisme.” (“If you love love, you’ll love Surrealism.”)

20th century movement

Organized chronologically, the show begins in Paris right before the 1920s, around the time when Freud’s writings were first translated into French, and Breton, the French poet who became a spokesman for the movement, began preaching a new vision of the world in which desire and imagination thrived unfettered.

The exhibit winds through more than a dozen galleries, opening with works by Giorgio de Chirico. The Italian artist’s paintings so moved the early Surrealists that his “The Child’s Brain,” a sensual image apparently of the artist’s father, hung above the bed of poet Paul Guillaume nearly all his life.

The next gallery focuses on the Dada Movement, with works by Man Ray, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. Introducing the idea of the body as machine, it features pieces like Man Ray’s 1918 “Man,” with its image of a hand mixer.

Next come works by Miro and Andre Masson, among the first artists to explore “automatic drawing,” the attempt to put down lines intuitively without thinking about what forms they might take.

They are followed by Dali, whose “Fried Eggs on the Plate Without the Plate” (showing droopy eggs and, yes, a plate) brings a smile, as does his 1936 “Lobster Phone,” a sculpture consisting of black telephone with a pink lobster-like receiver.

The show also features Magritte’s 1928 painting, “The Lovers,” a haunting image of a couple kissing, each of their heads wrapped in cloth, and his 1934 painting, “The Rape,” in which an androgynous face sprouts breasts and pubic hair.

The exhibit ends in 1959, when the Surrealists gave their last exhibit.