Surrealism, which began in Paris in 1924, continues to be one of the most influential and detrimental art movements ever to hit the United States. It freed such artists as Pollock, de Kooning, Noguchi, Calder, David Smith, and Joseph Cornell from the academic restraints of 1930s Social Realism. Inspired by the Surrealist abstractions of Jean Arp and Andre Masson, they produced abstract paintings and sculptures that are truly original, Modern, and “American.” Yet lesser artists, under the influence of lesser surrealists – cheesy artists like Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, and Salvador Dali – became (and still become) slaves to a trite, unimaginative, and literary academic style that merely repackages Social Realism, distorting and melting it like an acid trip or a funhouse mirror.

“Surrealism U.S.A.,” an exhibition of approximately 120 works that opens today at the National Academy Museum, gives us the full spectrum – from the miraculous to the banal – of Surrealist art produced on American soil between 1930 and 1950, arranged chronologically in five galleries. The sprawling, jam-packed show of paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and ephemera consists mostly of works made by Americans, but it does include artworks by European artists in exile, and is the first exhibition of its kind to do so.

The United States was officially introduced to Surrealism in 1931, when Chick Austin mounted the first exhibition of European Surrealism at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum. Austin, one of the first Americans to champion Modern art, recognized the importance and appeal of Surrealism as a movement. Under his directorship (also in 1931), the first Dali, “La Solitud,” entered a museum collection. This acquisition was simultaneously one of Austin’s greatest coups and greatest lapses in judgment: Five years later Dali was on the cover of Time; by 1937 he was hobnobbing with Harpo Marx in Hollywood; in 1939 his controversial “Dream of Venus” pavilion was featured at the World’s Fair.

Dali moved to the United States in 1940. Like many European artists who took refuge here during the World War II, he was embraced by American galleries and museums which, during the 1930s and 1940s, mounted numerous shows of Surrealist art by both American and European artists. Yet despite subsequent shows of Masson, early Miro, Giorgio de Chirico, Arp, and Tanguy (not to mention the American artists they inspired), it is Dali, Magritte, and Ernst who continue to be the most influential Surrealists on this side of the Atlantic.

Masson wrote in his 1941 essay “Painting Is a Wager,” “Towards 1930, five years after the foundation of Surrealism, a formidable disaster appeared in its midst: the demagogy of the irrational.” The majority of the works in “Surrealism U.S.A.” – indeed the very design of the exhibition, which incorporates black curtains, red lights, mannequin limbs, fun-house mirrors, and, in the last gallery, a spider web of string – illustrate this “demagogy.”

There are a couple dozen masterpieces in this overcrowded show, but the bulk of the works, because of their mediocrity, are merely blandly weird or weirdly bland. With their numerous eyes, floating in eerie landscapes, and their repetitive, psychosexual dripping, drooping, and morphing, they simply cancel one another out. What instead becomes immediately clear is who can drip and droop and who cannot.

Dali’s color, compared to most of the paintings here, is better, or at least fresher, than I remembered it to be. Tanguy, though, blows Dali away. Two of his paintings, “Indefinite Divisibility” and “Naked Water” (both 1942) are on view. Tanguy’s forms are clear and icy. He can convey silvery tonalities and various textures – fur, wood, air, smoke – in forms that resemble wind-whipped cloth frozen on the line. His game board landscapes are truly bizarre, and his game-piece forms – bird, bone, stone, breast – feel genuinely lost and inwardly driven.

One of the best works in the show is Masson’s “The Germ of the Cosmos” (1942), but it is not given enough breathing room to allow it to assert its presence – not to mention its importance to so many of the paintings nearby.

In “The Germ of the Cosmos,” an abstract, labyrinthine organism – fiery, floral, faunal, embryonic, cosmic – pulses like an organ freshly removed from its host. It is private, dark, and mythic; hidden yet vulnerable. At times it seems sexual, as if we were looking at some alien reproductive system. It also looks like a nut or a fruit that has been cut in half, everything inside laid bare. Like a strange animal or an insect with numerous eyes and legs, it is both like and unlike us; warm and cold; friendly and unfriendly.

Compare Masson’s painting with Helen Lundeberg’s “Plant and Animal Analogies” (1933-4), which is typical of the American Surrealism in the show. Lundeberg’s illustrative, diagrammatic painting merely demonstrates that there are visual and functional similarities among half a green pepper, cherry pits, tree roots, fallopian tubes, human lungs, and a womb. (All are linked together with dotted lines and arrows.) Or contrast the Masson with Alexandre Hogue’s “Erosion No. 2 – Mother Earth Laid Bare”(1936), in which a dry, barren field, puffed up like a down comforter but shaped like a prone nude woman, a la Mantegna’s “Dead Christ,” is being bitten and threatened by a phallic plow.

By contrast, Masson’s approach to Surrealism – which, at its most poetic, gives form to dream and unreality; the imaginary and the concrete; the inter nal and the external – is the inspiration behind other great works in “Surrealism U.S.A.” They include Noguchi’s “This Tortured Earth”(1942); Man Ray’s “Object of My Affection” (1940); two prints by Stanley William Hayter; the handful of works by Cornell; David Smith’s two bronze “Medal[s] for Dishonor” (both 1939), and his beautiful bronze “Reliquary House” (1945). An open box that suggests cathedral, casket, temple, still life, and landscape, “Reliquary House” combines elements that are figural, columnar, egg-, plow-, hay-, Venus-, and bone-like.

There are a few surprises in the exhibition – unknown, minor artists who show surprising signs of life. But the main thing it demonstrates is that Surrealism is not an end in itself. Made up of free-floating ideas, it cannot inherently offer a way to construct a sculpture or a painting. Surrealism is dependent upon other art movements – Cubism, Constructivism, abstraction, Dada, Social Realism. The artists who made the most of it, the artists for whom the “idea” made solid was not a dead end but worth the effort, were first and foremost painters or sculptors interested not in illustrating the intangible subconscious, but in making works of art.

Until May 8 (1083 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, 212-369-4880).