LONDON—You must not miss the “Surreal Things” exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum—on until July 22. You won’t see the really really great Surrealist paintings such as Salvador Dali’s The Great Masturbator (1929; in a private collection here and never lent to shows), but you will see how Surrealism, a serious movement that became playful, and which was bracketed between the main 20th-century art movements of Cubism and Abstraction, has affected the relationship between fine art and design—as seen in theater sets, interiors, fashion, film, architecture and advertising.

When I was researching The Persistence of Memory, my biography of Dali, ten years ago, I read with wistful pleasure of the fun and mayhem of Surrealism and the antics of its adherents. A Surrealist exhibition held in Paris at the beginning of the l930s was, for instance, held in darkness. The ceiling of the gallery was hung with bulging black garbage bags meant to represent our rather murky subconscious life, and every visitor was given a flashlight to negotiate the Stygian gloom. But it was the l936 International Surrealist Exhibition, here in London, which provided the movement with one of its legendary comedic moments. This was when Dali, bolted into a deep-sea diver’s suit to recite one of his very long poems, began to run out of air and panicked. Gala, his ferocious wife, had gone out to lunch together with the spanner that would release her husband. She was found just in time.

There aren’t any similar manic moments in the exhibition at the V&A, and it is well lit so you won’t need a flashlight. What you will see are classics such as Duchamp’s bottle rack, Man Ray’s flat iron with its row of tacks, Dali’s Aphrodisiac Jacket covered in glasses (which contained creme de menthe in its original incarnation) and Oscar Dominguez’s padded wheelbarrow. Eileen Agar’s spectacular Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse is in the noble tradition of Surrealist headgear, including Dali’s lamb-chop hat for Gala. The sparkling headboard made for Peggy Guggenheim by Alexander Calder no doubt lent glitter to her complicated love life. Most of the furniture is a bit variable but the last gallery, which shows the Elsa Schiaparelli gowns made in collaboration with Dali, presents the perfect melding of fine and applied art.

Well known through posters in thousands of student bedrooms, these Surrealist objects are ever haunting and still have the power to amuse and move. If you can’t get to the show then get the book. Called Surreal Things (V&A, £40.00), it spreads the surreal net wider than the show, including such works as Meret Oppenheim’s Object, the famous fur-covered teacup, saucer and spoon. T.S. Eliot and Herbert Read were entranced by this “super-objective correlative of the female sex” when they first saw it at the l936 International. Even though this iconic Surrealist piece isn’t in the exhibition, there are plenty of other things to make one realize why this curious art movement, which only flourished for 20 years in its purest form, is still influencing creative minds today.

To see how one contemporary artist and furniture designers have sat at the feet of the Surrealists, make the ten minute walk from the V&A to Cosmogarden, the young and (very) trendy designer Rabih Hage’s shop in Chelsea. Here, the Japanese artist Aki Kuroda fuses the cultures of the East and West, mixing Miro-esque shapes with Manga, Zen and chaos theory, Picasso’s Minotaur and mutant flowers, hybrid beasts and futuristic cities—and it’s all very original. Huge paintings of Kuroda’s fantastical universe are shown alongside biomorphic sculptural furniture, making a sparkling and witty show.

Completing this Surrealist London moment is the Tate Modern’s “Dali & Film” season, running from June 1. “The best cinema is the kind that can be perceived with your eyes closed,” he once wrote. And as is shown in a previously unknown letter to Edward James I discovered when writing Dali’s biography, cinema really did permeate his oeuvre. In explaining why he repeated certain images over and over again in his paintings, he wrote, “there are no pictures, there is only ‘one,’ which you continue all your life on different canvases like frames on the real film of the imagination.”