Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism 9783791343655, 9780901673749

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Angels of Anarchy

Angels of Anarchy Women

Artists and Surrealism

Edited by Patricia Allmer With contributions by Patricia Allmer Roger Cardinal Mary Ann Caws Georgiana M.M. Colvile Katharine Conley Alyce Mahon Donna Roberts

Manchester Art Gallery

PRESM@EL Munich : Berlin - London: New York

Published in conjunction with the exhibition

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009927645

Angels of Anarchy

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Women Artists and Surrealism

Manchester Art Gallery 26 September 2009-10 January 2010 Copyright © for the texts by Manchester Art Gallery 2009 Copyright © for design and layout by Prestel Verlag, Munich Berlin London New York 2009 For Picture Credits see p. 255-56

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Contents Foreword and Acknowledgements Curator’s Acknowledgements Of Fallen Angels and Angels of Anarchy

These Photographing Women: the Scandal of Genius

The Imaging of Magic

Safe as Houses: Anamorphic Bodies in Ordinary Spaces: Miller, Varo, Tanning, Woodman

Women Surrealists and the Still Life

Women Artists, Surrealism and Animal Representation

‘Neither Wings nor Stones’:

the Psychological Realism of Czech Women Surrealists

Angels of Anarchy List of Works Bibliography Artists’ Biographies Contributors’ Biographies

Index

Foreword and Acknowledgements

Te exhibition is the first major international

provoking exhibition that extends and enhances

g roup exhibition in the UK and Europe of twentieth-

the understanding of these artists’ radical and still

century women surrealist artists. Women played d

huge, but at the time not fully recognised, part

sometimes shockingly revealing work. Dr Allmer has

worked closely with my colleague, Fiona Corridan,

nthe surrealist movement, working in a variety of

who has more than capably steered this compli-

media including painting, print-making, sculpture

cated project to completion.

and photography. The movement’s intimate conn ection d

with the rise and dissemination of psycho-

nalytic theory makes it important far beyond its

With the rise in prominence of women artists within the field of contemporary art today we have reached a point where gender redress is no longer

O rigins in the world of contemporary modernism,

given as a reason for showing women’s art. Sheer

and only recently has an appreciation grown of how

quality and strength alone demand women’s place in

@

r

rucial women’s contributions were in this process.

the world’s galleries and exhibitions. There is consid-

he exhibition is the result of another successful

erable interest in the pioneers who made this hap-

collaboration between Manchester Art Gallery and

pen. Artists included in the exhibition such as Meret

Manchester Metropolitan University and began

Oppenheim, Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller and, more recent-

when my colleague, Tim Wilcox, put the embryo

ly, Francesca Woodman are heroines and role models

O f an idea for an exhibition of women

to a whole generation of women — not just artists.

surrealists

to Dr Patricia Allmer, Research Fellow in Art History

Manchester is a city famous for its his retory of

at the Manchester Institute for Research and Inno-

radical women and, as the home of the suffragette

vation in Art and Design (MIRIAD) at Manchester

movement, it is entirely appropriate that the gallery

Metropolitan University. Dr Allmer has researched

has brought this rarely seen group of pioneering

d

nd published widely in the field and she has enthu-

S| astically moulded this initial idea into a thought-

women artists together from around the world. The city’s tradition of nurturing powerful women’s

voices in politics and the arts from Elizabeth Gaskell,

by Meret Oppenheim. We are also indebted to other

Emily Pankhurst and the suffrage movement, to

galleries, collectors and artists’ relatives and descen-

Carol Ann Duffy, is the logical place to mount such an

dants who have allowed us to represent exhibiting

exhibition. Manchester Art Gallery too has a tradition

artists’ works with major loans, including: George

of mounting revisionist exhibitions of women’s art

and Betty Woodman, Katerina Jerinic and Marian

and previously brought the women artists of the Pre-

Goodman Gallery in New York; Arlette Souhami and

Raphaelite movement to attention for the first time.

Galerie Minsky, Josette Exandier, Alain Kahn-Sriber

This exhibition develops this lineage on a grander

and Roger and Brann Renaud in Paris; Xavier

scale and international stage and forms part of a

Cannone, Claude Chenot, Michel Hallers, Rosine

season of exhibitions on the theme of Radical Man-

Ortmans, and Wolfgang Schulte in Belgium; Eva

chester which have been made possible through

Kosadkova and Adéla Prochazkova, Jan Svankmajer

the strategic support of the North West Regional

and Bruno Solarik in the Czech Republic; Elizabeth

Development Agency.

Delerue, Dominique and Christoph Burgi in Switzer-

Manchester Art Gallery has succeeded in secur-

land; Walter Gruen and Malu Block in Mexico; Liana

ing major loans for this exhibition from around the

Zanfrisco and Roberto Lupo in Italy; James Birch, Paul

world. Many of the artists included will be shown

Conran, James Mayor and Richard Shillitoe in the UK.

in this country for the first time and the support of

Many institutions including Tate, Centre Georges

the surviving families and friends of these important

Pompidou, Museo De Arte Moderno Mexico, the

artists has enabled Dr Allmer to make exciting new

Museum of Modern Art and Fine Arts Museum, San

discoveries in the course of her research. | should

Francisco, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Jersey

like to thank the many private collectors and institu-

Heritage Trust, the Albany Institute in Buffalo, the

tions without whose generous support this exhibi-

Bluff Collection in New York, Galeria Juan Martin in

tion would not have been possible. We have been

Mexico, Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Museum of Modern

most privileged to have the support of three of the

Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

most significant private collectors of surrealism in

Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, the Edward James Foun-

this country, Andrew Murray, Antony Penrose and

dation, Leeds City Art Gallery and the Scottish

Dr Jeffrey Sherwin each of whom opened their

National Gallery of Modern Art in the UK have also

respective collections to us and whose generosity

been extremely generous in lending important

has ensured a very significant showing of works by

works to this exhibition.

women surrealists which we would have had diffi-

The exhibition has been generously supported

culty obtaining from elsewhere. Armando Colina

by our benefactors, The Zochonis Charitable Trust

has offered invaluable help in providing advice,

and Manchester Art Gallery Trust, and we are

contacts and helping us to secure works by Frida

extremely grateful to both of them.

Kahlo, Leonora Carrington and Lola Alvarez Bravo.

Lisa Wenger has generously offered her time in

Moira Stevenson

providing advice and assistance in securing works

HEAD OF MANCHESTER CITY GALLERIES

Curator’s Acknowledgements

A complex exhibition such as Angels of

Xavier Cannone, Armando Colina, Paul Conran,

Anarchy involves lots of collaborations and co-

Bruno Decharme, France Elysées, Krzysztof

operations. | would like to thank Tim Wilcox,

Fijalkowski, Marcel Fleiss, Cristina Foldesdy,

Fiona Corridan and their colleagues at Manchester

Nicoletta Forlano, Michel Hallers, Ruth Henry,

Art Gallery for their hard work. Thanks are also

Leen de Jong, Sharon-Michi Kusunoki,

due to Jim Aulich and to my department, the

Jacques Lacomblez, Thomas Levy, Martine Lusardy,

Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation

Andrew Major, Alena Nadvornikova, Maria Naula,

in Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan

Rosine Ortmans, Antony Penrose, Katka Pinosova,

University.

Adela Prochazkova, Michel Remy, Roger Renaud,

My gratitude extends to a number of individu-

Donna Roberts, Barbara Safarova, John Sears,

als for their expertise, advice and guidance,

Richard Shillitoe, Bruno Solarik, Jan Svankmajer,

and for their generous support throughout this

Lies Van de Cappelle and Lisa Wenger.

project. |am particularly grateful to Jean Benoit, Therese Bhattacharya-Stettler, James Birch, Ami Bouhassane, Lenka Bydzovska, Georgiana Colvile,

Patricia Allmer

Of Fallen Angels and Angels of Anarchy

‘The angel is that which unceasingly passes through

the envelope(s) or container(s), goes from one side to the other, reworking every deadline, changing every decision, thwarting all repetition.’ Luce Irigaray'

sls word ‘angel’ derives from the Latin ‘angelus’

Manifesto ofSurrealism: ‘Everything tends to make

meaning ‘messenger’; the angel is a signifier that

us believe that there exists a certain point of the

we are ‘about to enter another world’.* The angelic

mind at which life and death, the real and the imag-

function is one of prophecy, guidance and commu-

ined, past and future, the communicable and the

nication, a function of to-and-fro — ‘gestures of pas-

incommunicable, high and low, cease to be per-

sage between opposite states’.? The angelic posi-

ceived as contradictions’.4 This surrealist desire to

tion is a position of in-betweenness and motion.

overcome (hierarchical) oppositions and boundaries

These functions and positions are the strengths of

is present in a variety of surrealist concepts such as

angels: they overcome and deconstruct the paths

‘communicating vessels’, a metaphor for the dream

of Western patriarchal binary thought, its hierarchi-

which fuses inside and outside, reality and imagina-

cal structure, replacing stability with flux, singularity

tion. The term is taken from a scientific experiment

with multiplicity, separation with transgression,

which bears the same name: ‘in vessels joined by a

and being with becoming and transformation.

tube, a gas or liquid passing from one to the other

Flux, multiplicity, transgression, becoming

and transformation are major foci of the surrealist

rises to the same level in each, whatever the form of the vessel’.° As Mary Ann Caws notes, ‘this passing

women artists’ works represented in Angels of

back and forth between two modes is shown to be

Anarchy. Although these artists span three genera-

the basis of Surrealist thought, of Surreality itself’.

tions, their diverse artistic productions are mostly

independent from each other, ranging across a mul-

Communication, exchange, the passing-backand-forth, are the foundation of a variety of sur-

titude of twentieth-century media. However, they

realist activities, such as the surrealist game of

share a close interest in and draw on surrealism

exquisite Corpse — a game involving a number of

and its desires to overcome dualities, boundaries

participants, each writing or drawing on a piece of

and binaries, as André Breton states in the Second

paper which is folded and passed on to the next.

By unfolding the paper, a communal sentence/

absence was noted and regretted by, it seems, only

drawing emerges, a corpse, exquisite because cre-

Naville and Aragon’.'° The second series included

ated by a multiplicity, by a collective utterance, by

more women; whilst ‘Y’ from the first series remains

an assemblage. ‘Designed to provide the most

mysterious, Malcolm Imrie states in his ‘Notes on

paradoxical confrontation possible between the

Participants’ that a number of women participants

elements of speech [.. .]’’ and opening the possibil-

also cannot be identified, their histories lost: ‘[. . .]

ity for ‘tacit Communication between the partici-

we know nothing either of Jeannette Tanguy or

pants’,® this game allowed the exploration of lan-

Madame Unik, save for their marital status’."

guage anew. The game of the exquisite corpse is

Only from the 1930s onwards did the surrealist

also the site of collaborations between female and

movement start to include women as artists, an

male surrealists. It celebrates becoming and trans-

inclusion which, albeit not full, was arguably much

formation, the fluidity of identity rather than its

more pronounced than in other artistic move-

fixedness, and aesthetic production as a collective

ments. A number of the international surrealist

rather than individual activity. The (ideological)

exhibitions featured (some) women artists;

status quo Is also challenged in surrealism, by

women artists contributed to publications; and

seeking and teasing out the marvellous in the every-

Peggy Guggenheim organised the Exhibition by

day — without departing from it, surrealist strate-

31 Women at her Art of This Century gallery in New

gies reveal the everyday and familiar as marvellously

York in 1943, showing a range of women artists

unknown, differing from itself, differing from what

associated with surrealism, including Frida Kahlo,

ideologies dictate it to be.

Dorothea Tanning, Kay Sage, Meret Oppenheim and

However, whilst surrealist thought radically

Leonora Carrington. However, subsequent scholarly

challenged hierarchies, it often remained blind to

work often reinforced the exclusion of women

its own gender politics, locked in a heterosexual,

artists from the history of surrealism, by treating

sometimes homophobic, patriarchal stance posi-

their art as marginal to the movement. Popular his-

tioning and constructing women (and never men)

torical summaries of surrealism, for example, only

as artists’ muses, femme-enfants, virgins, dolls and

mention a few of the women artists and often only

erotic objects. As Gwen Raaberg points out ‘no

briefly in comparison to discussions lavished on

women [. . .] had been listed as official members

male artists,'*whilst the landmark exhibition Dada,

of the original surrealist movement, nor had they

Surrealism and Their Heritage at the Museum of

signed the manifestoes’.? There is also a signifi-

Modern Art in 1966 included only one artwork by a

cant absence of women in the first series of the

woman — Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup.

‘Recherches sur la sexualité’ — recordings of sur-

Scholarly work on women surrealists really began

realist discussion on ‘Investigating Sex’ in the early

in 1977 with a special encyclopaedic issue of

months of 1928, as Dawn Ades notes: ‘There were

Obliques. Since then, there have been significant

no women participants in the first series, apart from

developments in the field; a variety of key exhibi-

the mysterious Y in the seventh session [. . .]; their

tions have been devoted to individual artists; and

Fig. 1 Unknown Cast of Lee Miller’s Torso, c. 1942

Angels of Anarchy explores how women surrealists self-consciously work with surrealist strategies

of denaturalising ideologies and conventions to interrogate art itself as the grounding for the shaping and reconfirmation of a number of patriarchal positions. These ideological positions and beliefs are rooted in the ‘myth of the “artist” as an “empowered white man”’; in the myth that ‘his’ artworks are unique and original; and in monolithic

myths of linearity, present in a variety of immobile, universal categorisations ranging from chronologies

and (male) canons to generic divisions. ‘Art history’ and tradition reaffirm and shape patriarchal myths of origination and originality, always anchored in

man as the creator, ‘his’ objectivity (the notably flawed and exclusivist conventional tradition and history is represented as objectively determined and complete), and ‘his’ stability (canons, genres, periods are represented as stable and static and

cannot be changed); the terms originality, objectivity, uniqueness and stability being regarded as hierarchically superior to multiplicity, flux and transformation.

the major exhibition Mirror Images: Women, Sur-

Women surrealists’ works explore the ‘intimate

realism and Self-Representation at San Francisco’s

experience of boundaries, their construction and

Museum of Modern Art in 1999 explored women

deconstruction’.'* They explode and undo binary

artists and their self-representations in relation to

and hierarchical categorisation by ‘{. . .] rendering

surrealism. However, despite this focus on women

the tradition non-identical to itself’,'° perverting

artists and surrealism, there is still a pronounced

(in its sense of turning round) tradition, showing

absence of anglophone research on Czech, Belgian,

that tradition is not a fixed entity, but that it already

British and many French artists; a number of these

inoculates its own transmutations and becomings,

artists also remain little known in their home

deconstructing itself from within, thereby produc-

countries. Angels of Anarchy hopes to introduce

ing new forms. In a non-chronological manner, and

some of these lesser known artists, offering the

without pretending to present a complete canon of

chance to see rarely and sometimes never-before-

women surrealist artists, the exhibition traces the

exhibited artworks.

multiplicity of ways in which women surrealists

disrupt binaries, hierarchies, the linear, the fixed and

asson and René Magritte have painted artworks

the motionless. Its five sections — Portrait and Self-

based on this myth (Dali even referred to his wife

portrait, Landscape, Interior, Still Life, Fantasy—

as ‘Galatea’). These representations of Miller evoke

are not there to confirm the status quo of traditional

ary Ann Caws’ summary of women artists’ posi-

generic categories. On the contrary, the artworks in

tion in the surrealist movement as mostly consisting

these sections explode these categories from

of being muses, models represented in a ragmen-

within, demonstrating how the subversion of

tary manner by male artists: ‘Headless. And also

generic and gender categories, and of the traditions

footless. Often armless too; and always unarmed,

of art, lies at the core of these artistic productions.

except with poetry and passion. There they are, the

£

Surrealist women so shot and painted, so stressed A number of women surrealists are also iconic muses of the twentieth century. Peihaps the two best known of these muses are Dora Maar, Picasso’s

subject in many portraits, and Lee Miller, who was not only a fashion model for Vogue, but also the model for some of Man Ray’s most erotic photographs. Miller’s lips loom large in the sky in

Observatory Time, The Lovers (1934); an image of her eye is fixed to the ticking arm of a metronome in Indestructible Object 1923); her neck is the

focus of Lee Miller (Neck) (1930); and her torso particularly fascinated

an Ray, as is evident from

photographs such as Shadows on Lee Miller’s Torso (1930) and Electricity (1931). This torso is united

with its plaster cast (fig. 1 and pl. 118) in photographs by Roland Penrose taken around 1942 (fig.

2).In Jean Cocteau’s film The Blood of aPoet (1930), Miller appears as a marble statue, arms missing,

brought to life through the touch of a poet enacting the Greek myth of Pygmalion. The myth represents the positions of men and women in the his-

tory of art: the artist (male, creative, active) brings his artwork, Galatea (female, created, passive), to

life, a myth threading through the history of art and also dominant in surrealism — Salvador Dali, Andrée Fig.2 Roland Penrose, Portrait of Lee Miller, ‘Which-be-Witch’, Lee Miller with body cast, known as ‘Bewitches Witch’, 1942. Roland Penrose Estate

and dismembered, punctured and severed: is it any

as Marsha Meskimmon states: ‘The self-portrait as a

wonder she has (we have) gone to pieces?’'>

form is dependent upon the concept of the artist as

Questioning and subverting this genre is there-

a special individual, worthy of representation in his

fore an elemental function of women artists — not

own right. And, indeed, it is in Ais own right; since,

only in order to reclaim the passivising representa-

linked to the status of fine artists, self-portraiture

tion of women, but also to inscribe the female artist

has evolved features mainly exclusive to male

into the genre of surrealism. Self-portraiture has

artists’.'’ Penny Slinger’s collage, Read my Lips

served the male artist to affirm his identity as sub‘

ject, ‘masterful creator’ and ‘tortured soul’, whilst

women have been mostly represented as objects;

(1973) (fig. 4 and pl. 111) satirises the fragmented, often metonymic representation of women in patriarchy as observed by Caws. Read my Lips seems

to be a feminist response to and a re-appropriation

of René Magritte’s The Rape (1934) (fig. 3), which metonymically transposes a woman’s body onto her face — the crotch forming her mouth. Here, sur-

realist collage is used, according to Slinger, to approach surrealism from ‘a woman’s point-of-view,

attempting to bring to light the half that has long

remained hidden. [. . .] present[ing] the muse as

her own subject (as opposed to object) [. . .].""8 And the muses do return as outstanding artists. iller’s destruction of her image as muse and

model at the level of her photographs is the more powerful, as it heavily references the statuesque representations of herself mentioned above.

Revenge on Culture (1940) (pl. 73) is an ironic commentary on her own position as objectified, photographic muse. Here a fallen statue of an angel is represented. Its face bears striking similarities to

representations of Miller’s statuesque face familiar from Man Ray’s photographs and images from Vogue. Miller’s ‘fallen angel’ is discarded, echoing Emila Medkova’s forgotten sculpture of an angel huddled against a wall (pl. 69); the tumbled sculpture’s head is severed by what looks like a thick

cable, her torso weighed down by a brick. Here the statue, the idealised object of male desire, Fig.3 René Magritte, Le Viol [The Rape], 1934. Oil on canvas, 73x54cm. The Menil Collection, Houston.

Fig.4 Penny Slinger Read My Lips, 1973

no longer awakens but is destroyed, as a revenge on the culture which produced it, opening the space

for a different kind of representation of femininity and self. Even the title Revenge on Culture is twofold — whilst it refers to the destructive powers of patriarchy in World War Il, it also alludes to patri-

archy’s destruction of women. On a further level the title is ironic, suggesting Miller’s own Revenge on (patriarchal) Culture, as Miller commented: ‘| looked

like an angel, but | was a fiend inside’. In Revenge

on Culture, the common male depiction of Miller as object to be looked at is shattered, is no longer flawless. For women surrealist artists the genre of selfportraiture is a ‘way of coming into representation

[. . .], in which the artist is both subject and object and conceives of how she looks in the sense of how she sees rather than how she appears’.'? The

artist as both subject and object lie at the core of Claude Cahun’s self-portraits which re-appropriate the genre of self-portraiture and the representa-

vampire, and vamp, she deconstructs any notion-

tion of women from a male domain (pls. 21-24).

ally stable identity.

Claude Cahun’s masquerades unhinge and mock

gender stereotypes whilst revealing gender to be

The self as an unstable category is also represented in Emmy Bridgwater’s Transplanted (1947)

a fluid category which can literally take on many

(pl. 19) — the portrait of the artist emerges out of

faces: ‘Under this mask, another mask. | will never

two twigs grafted together. Grafting, the joining

be finished carrying all these faces’,2° Cahun

together of two distinct pieces which meld into

comments in her autobiography Disavowals: or

one, is here not only a metaphor for gender identi-

Cancelled Confessions. ‘Never be finished’ empha-

ties, but also for artistic identity and for the art

sises the processual rather than the finite and

work itself, destroying the myth of ‘originality’ and

reveals identity as endless becoming, which can

independent creativity. Here art and the artist are

be shaped, re-shaped and changed, rather than

becoming through the grafting together of two dis-

being. Following the surrealist functions of mas-

parate parts, similar to a surrealist collage, recalling

querade as ‘weapons in Surrealism’s assault on

J. Hillis Miller's equation of the artistic text to the

the foundations of the “real”’,2? Cahun extends

grafting of wood: ‘a new text in a different lan-

this assault — as angel, body builder, skinhead,

guage that will be grafted on the original and draw

Fig.5 Ithell Colquhoun Scylla, 1938

life and portraiture in this painting. The other half of Kahlo’s face is the face of Diego Rivera, her husband, but also, significantly, that of another artist, sug-

gesting that the artistic self is not independent and discrete, but emerges from fusions with others. This

double portrait is at the centre of a heart-shaped bulb, in which tubers bifurcate. This rhizomatic re-

presentation of the (artistic) self, like the multiple

and the graft, is ‘open to becomings’2? and undermines hierarchical, binary organisation. ‘The muse as her own subject’ is also at the core of little-explored photographs by women surrealists of women surrealists. Away from her traditional

status as muse of the male artist, away from her conventional representation through the male gaze, here the muse is revealed as artist. These

photographs offer alternative representations of these artists — often representing them with their artworks. Perhaps one of the most intimate of

these portraits is one where the artist actually /s no onger, namely Lola Alvarez Bravo’s Kahlo portrait

Frida’s room (c. 1954) (pl. 10): a single, discarded shoe, a photograph of Diego, a Kahlo painting, the wheelchair on which a pot with brushes and a

its life from that original, while being as different

pallet are placed — this summary of Kahlo’s life is

from it as a grafted tree is from the rootstock on

arranged in the form of a Kahloesque still life,

which it grows. [. . .] One life flows into the other

inverting the conventional emphasis on Kahlo’s art

and draws life from the other’.2* The artwork as well

being biographical to offer Kahlo’s biography as

as identity are here no longer regarded as ‘original’,

artistic. Confidence and strength mark the subjects

but emerge as hybrids from exchange and inter-

in these images, artworks which are also crucial

change.

documentary evidence offering an alternative

Similarly Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait Diego and

history of surrealism.

Frida 1929 -1944 (1) (1944) (pl. 54) represents the artist as a botanical fusion (symbolic of change and flux rather than stability) between herself and an

Traditional Renaissance perspective understands

other, a fusion doubled by the generic fusion of still

the structure of a painting, as well as its content, as

analogous to an ‘open window’*4 looking out onto

of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially

reality, as was famously argued by Leon Battista

distort representation [. . .]’.2” The tear in the net

f

Alberti in his treatise Della pittura in 1435, implying

in Miller’s photograph offers an alternative perspec-

that a painting can be an accurate reflection of

tive on ‘reality’, proposing that reality can be per-

reality. This perspective is radically challenged by

ceived not from the ‘window’ of tradition but from

Lee Miller’s Portrait of Space (1937) (the title

a spreading, rhizomatic structure which is unstable

already connotes generic transgressions between

and cannot be contained.

portraiture and landscape) (pl. 77). Alberti’s rect-

Other appropriations of the generic tradition of

angular window has been here replaced by a tear

Ps landscape into a specifically feminine and feminist

in a net which opens up onto a landscape outside.

discourse can be found in Jane Graverol’s The Holy

The tear resembles the uneven shape of a vagina

Spirit (1965)

(fig. 6 and pl. 49) and Ithell Colauhoun’s

(which is also referred to colloquially as a ‘crack’, a

Scylla (1938) (fig. 5 and pl. 33). In The Holy Spirit

type of tear), a broken hymen, but also the shape of

the formation of two rocks resembles a woman’s sil-

an eye. In this photograph it is no longer the even,

houette. A bird in flight, an icon of flux and motion,

rectangular frame of the window or the painting

marks her crotch. Here the body is no longer a

which allows a direct view onto an outside, but the

discrete entity, detached from its environment, but

uneven, fragile shape of the tear/crack. This tear

is shaped by it, entangled in it, deconstructing

evokes other famous tears in the history of art, such

the boundaries between landscape and portrait,

as the tear in St Thomas’s cloak in Caravaggio’s

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (c. 1601-02). There the tear mirrors Christ’s wound which St Thomas is touching; the wound/tear/crack being

the site of the ‘truth’ of Christ’s transformation and becoming. Like a crack, the tear ‘runs its course in

a continuous, imperceptible, and silent way [. . .] that which it transmits does not allow itself to be

determined, being necessarily vague and diffuse. [. . .] it always takes an oblique line, being ready to

change directions [. . .]’.2° As Gilles Deleuze states, Renaissance perspective ‘has only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective, and in consequence a false depth. It mediates everything, but

mobilises and moves nothing’.?° In contradistinction, the tear diverges and decentres, it causes movement which ‘implies a plurality of centres, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points Fig.6 Jane Graverol

L'Esprit saint [The Holy Spirit], 1965

Fig. 7 Nicolaes Maes, Young Woman Peeling Apples, c. 1655. Oil on wood, 54.6 x 45.7 cm. Bequest of

Benjamin Altman, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

off, leaving the muscle tissue exposed, literally dismantling the phallus as a symbol of patriarchy. The phallus as symbol of the singularity of patriarchal authority is further questioned here in

its doubling. This doubling of phalli also occurs in Eileen Agar’s photographs of Rocks at Ploumanach, Brittany (1936) (pl. 7). The multiplication of the phallus undermines Western patriarchal notions of uniqueness, primacy and origin also perpetuated

in art’s hierarchical preference for the ‘original’ over and above its representation. This doubling is

multiplied still further by another phallic object, a boat sailing towards the cleft between the rocks, which is doubled by its shadow. However, on closer examination the two

phalli/rocks in Scylla reveal themselves to be part of a female body (perhaps sitting in a bath tub); they become thighs, and the algae between the two rocks, like the bird in flight in Graverol’s The Holy between inside and outside, creating cross-generic

Spirit, represents the woman’s pubic area. Here

fertilisations (is such an artwork a landscape or is it a

male and female bodies conflate with each other,

portrait?). Colquhoun’s Scylla manipulates generic

entering into dialogues and entangled relation-

and gender boundaries and categorisations, trans-

ships.

forming the body into a landscape and a landscape into a body, or rather, promoting multiplicities of

bodies. As in The Holy Spirit, the formation of two

According to Griselda Pollock:

rocks, looming out of the surrounding sea, is central

Against women the fiction of an eternal, natural

to these mutations. On one level the two rocks,

O

ever so slightly touching each other, resemble two

to ratify the continuing power of men over

penises, thus playing on the patriarchal association

women.

=

der of things is monolithically employed

between phallus (as a monolithic ideology) and rock,

The justification for making women exclusively

yet disempowering these stereotypes by the soft

responsible for domestic work and child care

contact of the two phalli. The patriarchal association

is assumed to be the nature of women.

of phalli and rocks is also disturbed by the penises’

Historically produced social roles are

texture and consistency, represented as bare and

represented in bourgeois ideologies as

vulnerable, as if the skin would have been peeled

timeless and biologically determined.?8

Women surrealists render unfamiliar the familiar

its mouth gagged — was constructed by André

domestic interiors associated, as Pollock notes, with

Masson. Graverol has replaced the caged, gagged

the ideologically seen ‘natural’ environments of

woman’s head by a smirking angel. The angel’s smirk

women. The generic retradition of interiors is used

seems, like Woodman’s female angelic figure dissolv-

as ‘the master’s tools to destroy his house’.*? The

ing out of the disintegrating (domestic) interior, to

everyday, domestic interior is emptied out and

imply that it is impossible to cage angels since the

returns as a space full of haunting and nightmarish

angel joins ‘corporeal and incorporeal states’.?!

potentials — potentials for transformation and

Woodman’s Untitled from 1977-78 (pl. 128)

becoming. In Dorothea Tanning’s Eine kleine Nacht-

engages In a complex discourse on women and the

musik (1943) (pl. 114) and Leonora Carrington’s

interior as the assigned feminine space. A woman

Self-portrait (c. 1937-38) (pl. 30) such nightmarish

hangs on a doorframe seemingly crucified, redefin-

potentials are clearly connected to childhood.

ing the image of the sacrifice of Christ for humanity

n Rachel Baes’ interiors (pls. 15, 16), only traces

as the sacrifice of woman for patriarchy. This angelic

of femininity remain in barren, emptied out rooms.

figure hovers above the barren, spotless, tiled floor,

n Remedios Varo’s Insomnia (1947) (pl. 123) the

reminiscent of traditional Netherlandish interiors.

interior is marked by the inescapability of a dominating gaze and confinement stretching out endessly into labyrinthine multiplications of rooms.

Francesca Woodman’s House #3 (1976) (pl. 125)

shows an interior in the process of disintegration. The processual (becoming) rather than the completion (being) of this disintegration is emphasised by a

female figure on the verge of dissolution, evoking an angel in transcendence, a dissolving figure recalling Jane Graverol’s The Celestial Prison (1963) (pl. 48). je) n Graverol’s painting an angel is locked in a bird cage, recalling the conventional metaphor of women as ‘birds in a gilded cage’, as well as Dante’s description

of the angel as a ‘divine bird’,*° drawing together a multiplicity of intertextual references. Graverol’s paint-

ing is also a reclaiming of surrealist representations of the feminine as caged, such as the surrealist Mannequin at the Exposition Internationale du

Surréalisme in 1938 which featured in photographs by

Man Ray (fig. 8) and Raoul Ubac. The Mannequin —a dummy whose head is enclosed by a wicker bird cage, Fig.8 Man Ray, Mannequin with a Bird Cage over her Head (Leaf 19) from Resurrection des Mannequins, 1938-66. Gelatin silver photograph, 18.4x13.6 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

A white cloth lies discarded on a solitary chair, evok-

bed. Nature morte: dead nature refers here to the

ing traditional interior scenes where women are

destruction of the ideology that these functions of

depicted sitting, cloth/apron draped over their laps,

women are ‘natural’. Similarly, Eva Svankmajerova’s

absorbed in domestic works such as peeling vege-

Bed (1976) (pl. 113) explores and disturbs bound-

tables and apples or sewing, as in Nicolaes Maes

aries of inside and outside, of presence and

Young Woman Peeling Apples (c. 1655) (fig. 7),

absence. It depicts an interior scene set in an out-

William Kay Blacklock’s

A Woman Peeling Vege-

side landscape; the intimacy of the fold of the

tables (1872) and Van Gogh’s Interior with Peasant

vaginal labia is here transposed onto the intimacy of

Woman Sewing (1885). The discarded cloth implies

the fold in the duvet, inviting the occupant to enter,

an abandonment of female domestic labour, as

a fold created by women’s labour. The fold itself

well as, implicitly, an unnecessary male loin-cloth.

signifier of in-betweenness. Folding is a practice of

In other artworks the bedroom as boudoiresque

f

is a

spacing, it creates an inside and an outside with

setting, draped with nudes for satisfying the male

additional spaces where new things can happen. It

gaze, is re-examined. In Graverol’s Last Pleasures

creates a ‘one and other’ whilst its own space fluctu-

(1962) (pl. 50) the boudoiresque bed, decorated

ates, remaining always in limbo — is the fold on the f£

with little cherubs, conflates generic categories —

inside or is it outside? The fold behaves like a hinge,

the bed Is displaced in a landscape. This conflation

creating, out of a simple surface, two — it compli-

of genres is pushed further by placing a skeletal

cates matters, loses ‘the smooth simplicity of its sur-

pelvis on the bed, a symbol of nature morte. This

face’?* and produces a strange conflation of multi-

pelvis seems to unite and represent the ‘naturally’

plicity and singularity — that which was singular

regarded functions of women in patriarchy, ranging

becomes multiple and yet remains singular — ‘the

from the erotic function of pleasuring the male

fold renders (itself) manifold but (is) not (one)’.??

gaze as nudes, to the biological function of giving

The fold unites through distinction and difference:

birth, to the domestic function of making the

as Deleuze states, it ‘relates one to the other by distinguishing them: a severing by which each term casts the other forward, a tension by which each

fold is pulled into the other’.?4 It decomposes and recomposes itself, fans out and pulls together again to produce new networks of differences, erasing any

possibility of a master discourse, instead creating a dialogic structure which is marked by ‘a dynamic process of multiple meanings and hovering significations constantly reactivated’ .*° The fold doubles the conflation of generic categories presented here, re insisting on the transgression of categorisations and

the reign of the multiple and the manifold. Fig.9 Meret Oppenheim, Objet (Le Déjeu-

ner en fourrure) [Object (Breakfast in Fur)), 1936. Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon (cup 10.9.cm in diameter; saucer 23.7.cm in diameter; spoon 20.2 cm long, overall

height 7.3 cm) The Museum of Modern Art

explored in Oppenheim’s objects, such as Souvenir Still life as a genre is significant on a number of

of Breakfast in Fur (1970) (pl. 91) — an ironic me-

levels in relation to gender politics. On one level,

mento (mori) of Object (Breakfast in Fur) (1936)

according to Lillian S. Robinson, the genre of still

(fig. 9), her famous teacup dressed in fur which

life, as a record of men’s worldly goods during the

overshadowed her career as it became increasingly

embourgeoisement of European society in the

the only artwork used to signify her artistic pro-

seventeenth century, emerges at the same time as

duction. Object (Breakfast in Fur) ‘alludes to the

the beginning of the commodification of women

feminine. The fur suggests an expensively decked-

in artworks. As she notes, women were ‘more and

out woman; the cup, hollow yet round, can evoke

more transformed into unsentimentalized private

female genitalia; the spoon with its phallic shape

property [. . .], Commodities’.7° Women were in-

further eroticizes the hairy object’.7° Object

creasingly placed in domestic settings in which,

(Breakfast in Fur) ironises the objectification

‘strangely immobilized, they participated in the

and fetishization of women, whilst the souvenir

paintings [. . .] as passive objects, part of the inven-

multiplies this original, destroying notions of

tory’.2” The commodification of women in artworks

‘uniqueness’.

increasingly resembled the commodities represented in still lifes — goods which can be consumed

Lee Miller’s photographs of an amputated breast (c. 1929) (pl. 74), a consequence of a

and owned. On another level, traditional still lifes

mastectomy, represent it disturbingly in a tradi-

often record, but repress, the female labour present

tional still-life manner. The breast is placed on a

in the needle work of table cloths, the preparation

plate which is neatly arranged on a set table, in-

of the represented foods and drinks, the setting of

cluding a patterned place-mat and cutlery that

the table and arrangements of flowers. On a further

evokes the stereotypical neatness of tables set by

level, due to the domestic setting of still life, this

women. The photographs were taken in the halls

was the only genre in which women were strongly

of Vogue magazine before security guards were

represented and were also able to attain fame, as in

able to remove Lee Miller and her photographic

the cases of artists Annie Feray Mutrie and Martha

subject/object — a memento mori indeed. These

Darley Mutrie for example.

powerful images are an absolute rejection, a radical

Women surrealists’ exploration of still life takes

refusal, of the male gaze; they undermine and

on this multiplicity of layers. On one level it is a

deny traditional representations by male artists

continuation of a generic tradition in which

of breasts as desirable objects. Instead the breast

women artists did play a significant role, but it is

is, literally, served and fed back to the male gaze

also the rendering visible of women’s labour and,

as diseased/dead meat. ‘Refuse’ becomes ‘refusal’;

furthermore, the genre is appropriated to dish

the genres coalesce in disturbing, challenging

up the objectification of women to patriarchy.

ways.

The collapsing of still life as a genre to record objects and the commodification of women is

This thematic concern is continued in Francesca Woodman’s photograph From the three kinds

of melon in four kinds oflight series (1975-78)

uncontainable flesh of the melons, is a vanitas,

(pl. 129). The photograph shows a woman’s bare

perhaps for the status quo.

breast(s). Her objectification is emphasised, but

These reworkings of representations of

also challenged, through a number of strategies:

women’s bodies are also echoed in Frida Kahlo’s

first, by excluding her face from the shot; second,

still lifes which, together with her self-portraits,

a photograph (as medium of objectification),

constitute the core foci of her ceuvre. Still Life with

ve

a representation, of a broached melon replaces

Watermelons (pl. 58) from 1953 shows two

and restricts our view onto the left breast; and third,

slices of watermelons arranged together with

two halved melons are positioned directly in front

other Mexican fruits. The arrangement once again

of the woman, doubling her breasts and emphasis-

recalls a pair of breasts, butfe also strangely evokes

ing the patriarchal metonymisation and fetishisa-

male genitalia, conflating gender oppositions in

tion of women’s body-parts. This tripartite objectifi-

a manner resembling Colguhoun’s Scylla. How-

cation, from a woman’s breast to the overripe,

ever, gender identities are closely bound up with national identities in Kahlo’s paintings. Here one of

the fruits is pierced by a phallic flag pole (evoking in turn the metal pole which pierced her stomach

and pelvis nthe bus accident in 1925 from which she never fully recovered). The connection of gender and national identities is also explored in Still Life with Parrot and Flag (1951) (pl. 55), which offers a complex engagement and critique of

women’s symbolic function as mother-country. Here, Mexican fruits (products of national fertility) function as metonymies of the female body, of

breasts and wombs. The boundaries of these female signifiers of nationality (and also femininity) are fragile, signified by the sliced and broached fruits whose flesh threatens to spill out. The personal in these artworks is deeply political, and vice versa.

According to Whitney Chadwick, fantastic scenarios play a significant role in women surrealist artists’ works allowing the exploration of alternative social orders and personae, exploring the identification Fig. 10 Frida Kahlo Autorretrato con Pelo

Corto, [Self-portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940. Oil on canvas, The Museum of

Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Gift of

Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., 1943.

Fig. 11 Mimi Parent

Maitresse |Mistress], 1996

with ‘mom ents prior to historical time and/or outSide the “civ lised” cultural spaces identified wit!

patriarchy’

’ However, still more interestingly, a

number of artists draw on this genre to rework a 1d

appropriate fairy-tales and classic myths which ar (a) strongly anchored in patriarchy.

Mimi Parent’s Mistress (1996) (fig. 11 and pl. 95) is a whip constructed out of two blond braids which she cut from h er own hair after learning about

her partner Jean Benoit’s unfaithfulness. Parent’s Mistress mixes the fairy-tale of Rapunzel’s golden

Mair, lowered down to allow her p rince to climb up er tower, with the dark pleasures and pains of de

Sade evoked b y the surrealist conflation of the

softness of hai with the hardness associated with

whips. The severed hair (strangely reminiscent of iller’s photograph o a severed, cut-off breast and Oppenheim’s objects f

is

arejection of traditional

eminine roles and identities. Cutti

g off t 71e

braided hair is not only a severi ng from patriarchal

tradition where women’s hair is tamed by braiding, but is a so a signifier of becomi ng woman, braids

for the term maitre; the maitresse is always already

being suggestive of girlhood. Hair is a signifier of

subjugated to a maitre.

femininity, asthe line of a Mexican love song inscribed in Ka hlo’s Self-portrait with Cropped Hair

(1940)

(fig. 10 (which shows Kahlo surrounded by

Women

surrealist arti sts often projected

‘aspects of the self as animal surrogates’ which gave ‘form to the

instinct ual, the sexual, the un-

ing of self and other’,*°

her two cut of braids and bushels of hair) reads:

contained’, an ‘interweav

‘Look, if | loved you it was for your hair, now that

emphasising hybridity and becoming

you are hai rles s, | don’t love you anymore’. As in the

points to the stasis of being. One of these recurring

fairy-tale o Ra punzel, who escapes her tower by

mythic figures appropriat ed by women surrealists is

sacrificing her braids as climbing ropes, liberation

the sphinx, which in classi c mythology has the head

here occurs th rough shedding conventional signi-

and breasts of a woman, the body of a lioness and

fiers of femininity. Parent’s whip transforms the

the wings of an eagle. InJane Graverol’s The Schoo!

as counter-

maitre’s (master’s) tool, the whip, into a tool of the

of Vanity (1967) (pl. 47) t he hybrid nature of the

maitresse (mistress), emphasising in the process

sphinx is emphasised by t ye artwork being a surre-

that English an d French offer no female equivalent

alist collage made out of different magazine

Fig. 12. Emmy Bridgwater

Leda and the Swan, c.1950

oreau and Salvador Dali. This myth is recovered and appropriated by women surrealists — changing it from the scene of a rape, to scenes of fusion, transformation and becoming. In Valentine

Penrose’s collage The Fairies |(1934-42) (pl. 99), the swan seems to be part of Leda and vice versa;

in Emmy Bridgwater’s Leda and the Swan (c. 1950) fig. 12 and pl. 20) both merge and become part of their environment; and Mimi Parent’s Leda and

the Swan (1997) (pl. 94) fuses Leda with the swan to form an angelic hybridic being with wide-spread wings.

And finally there are the myths of angels, guardian angels, fallen angels, angels of mercy,

angels of anatomy: Francesca Woodman’s angel in “On Being an Angel #1” (1977) (pl. 127), whose hypnotic look sees the world upside-down and

therefore, paradoxically, the right-way-round; and

Eileen Agar’s Angel of Anarchy (1936-40) (pl. 3), cuttings. Lee Miller juxtaposes herself with a sphinx

a plaster cast of a clay bust of her future husband,

in Self-portrait with Sphinxes (1940) (pl. 72).

Joseph Bard, wrapped and ornamented with African

And sphinxes recur in Leonor F ni’s artworks, such

bark cloth, Chinese silk sash, beads, osprey and

as Little Hermit Sphinx (1948) (pl. 44). In-between-

ostrich feathers, enacting a man’s becoming-

£ ness is not only anchored in the igure of the sphinx,

woman. Harold Bloom suggests that ‘otherness is

but also in its role — sphinxes are ‘guardians of

the essence of the angels; but then it is our essence

the threshold between life

and death whose posts

£

also’.4* The angel is one of the key symbols of

[...] at

the top of entrances to temples and mau-

women surrealists, because it brings together the

soleums

were later assumed by the angels of

‘divine and human, the immanent and transcen-

Christianity’.*! The myth of Leda who is raped by Zeus in the form of a swan, is perhaps one of the most £

forceful

myths connoting male domination, and

dent’.*? It is a symbol of hybridity and becoming which faces and reshapes history and tradition, in the artist’s own image.

Women surrealists’ artistic strategies make and

threads through the history of art from early

remake meaning, fragmenting essentialist gender

depictions in the 2nd or 3rd century CE to repre-

binaries to challenge the entire edifice of Western

sentations by Michelangelo, Pier Francesco Mola,

thought. They shift the attention from ‘object to

Leonardo da Vinci, Francois Boucher, Gustave

process, from an ontology of being to one of

becoming’, thinking ‘beyond an economy of the

Claire Colebrook, ‘Introduction’ in Buchanan and Colebrook

same, of the already-known’.”4 Aside from purely

2000), 4. Mary Ann Caws, ‘Seeing the Surrealist Woman: We Are a Problem’

biographical explorations, Angels of Anarchyis an

in Caws, Kuenzli, and Raaberg (1990), 11.

investigation into the ways in which women surreal-

Meskimmon (1996), 15. nterview with Penny Slinger, Mavericks of the Mind (Internet

ists challenge patriarchy and how, through this, they

allow surrealism to overcome its own blindness. Within the recognisable parameters of surrealist

edition), http://users.lycaeum.org/~ maverick/slinger.htm accessed 23.08.08). Rosy Martin, ‘Foreword’ in Meskimmon (1996), xv.

Cahun (2008), 183.

artworks, they extend the movement’s radical

Whitney Chadwick ‘An Infinite Play of Empty Mirrors: Women,

potential to subvert, question and overcome.

Surrealism, and Self-Representation’ in Chadwick (1998), 23.

Miller (1992), 148. Buchanan and Colebrook (2000), 21. Alberti (1966), 56. Deleuze (2004), 363.

Notes

1 Irigaray (2004), 16.

bid., 56. Pollock (1988), 25.

André Breton, ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1930), in Breton

Buchanan and Colebrook (2000), 4.

N BW

(2000), 123. Breton (1990), ix. Ibid. Breton (1972), 288. Ibid., 290. i) Gwen ep) SI @s) We)

Raaberg ‘The Problematics of Women and Surrealism’ in

Caws, Kuenzli and Raaberg (1991), 2. 10 Pierre (1992), 187.

11. ‘Ibid., 173. 12 E.g. Waldberg (1965); the 64 colour plates in Ades (1974) only reproduce two women artists associated with Dada: Hannah

Hoch and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. No artwork by a woman surrealist is reproduced; Bradley (1997) offers a section on ‘Women in Surrealism’, however most of the women artists are only mentioned

once, and a number are not mentioned at all. 13

Deleuze (1994), 55-56.

Krier and Harvey (2004), 77.

Serres (1995), 12.

Meskimmon (2003), 15.

14 Haraway (1991), 181.

Dante (2003), 37(canto 2, line 38). Krier and Harvey (2004), 6. Derrida (1981), 259. Ibid., 229. Deleuze (1993), 34. Adamovicz (1998), 25. Robinson, (1986), 41. bid. Renée Riese Hubert, ‘From Déjeuner en fourrure to Caroline: Meret Oppenheim’s Chronicle of Surrealism’, in Caws, Kuenzli and Raaberg (1990), 39.

Chadwick (1998), 25. Ibid., 12-13. Knapp (1995), 9. Bloom (2007), 23. Krier and Harvey (2004), 77 eskimmon (2003), 3.

These Photographing Women: the Scandal of Genius

, is all very mysterious. How there happen to

be three such photographers of, yes, genius, within the movement we think of as surrealism

boggles the imagination. Each of them: Claude Cahun, Dora Maar and Lee Miller, in their wildly different fashions, provides us as observers

with a trove of peculiarities uneasily qualified as characteristic of the oddness that remains the

surrealist look.! As for mystery, take Cahun’s The Mystery of

Adam of 1929 (fig. 13). Everything so wonderfully clashes: are those strange-looking crumpled wings

of the annunciatory angel made out of tinfoil, as if straight from some kitchen drawer in a surrealist

heaven? Some heavenly costume: we can’t not

notice the pointed jabs of the skirt, like some child’s idea of the rays of a star. And since when did angels wear those 1920s’ shoes with the curved heel? It’s a very odd position, all right, kneeling on one leg with the other turned out provocatively and those arms palm-outward from the body twisted sideways. To say nothing of the provocative look we Fig. 13 Claude Cahun Le Mystere Adam [The Mystery of Adam], 1929. Gelatin silver print, 10.16 x7.62 cm. Fractional and prom-

ised gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Fig. 14 Claude Cahun Self-portrait, 1927

recognize so frequently in Cahun. Annunciation indeed: it is very much as if all the shots of Cahun were to be annunciations, of self and of presenta-

tion of self. What she does, she does to provoke us. Look at the way she shows us her profile, that of Lucy Schwob so exactly

like that of her famous uncle,

arcel Schwob: same nose, same haughty turn O the face. Or all her various self-posturings with Ps

masks — from early to late. From her acting career

d uring her early days in Paris with the plays of Pierre Albert-Birot, in which she was disguised as one of

the wives of Bluebeard, for example, she certainly retained the impulse of disguise and the outwardturned self, showing itself always different. The mask covers, and it attracts — but what it does not

do is reveal anything about the personality of the face behind it. There seems always to be another

face. On top of that, we don’t really know which of the self-portraits and self-postures she snapped and which were taken by her half-sister and always lover Suzanne Malherbe, known as Marcel Moore, since

Schwob, as near to original as it gets (fig. 15 and

they both chose masculine names; but in my view,

pl. 24). As if, from the beginning, it were always to

that doesn’t really matter. Cahun chose the pose.

be a double shot: in the mirror, face turned toward

She chose the angle. And the entire presentation.

you and, in the mirror turned away: she’s looking

For the provocative shot of Se/F-portrait of 1927

at you to size up your reaction. My initial one was:

fig. 14 and pl. 22), she chooses the rosebud mouth,

what a great large-checked shirt: look at the way

the spit curls on either side of the forehead, the dark

the collar just reaches by the chin up to the ears.

nipples through the T-shirt, the white neck scarf, pro-

Snazzy.

tective arm bands, black shorts and boots of a hard-

As for her still lives, many of the objects so

ened babe athlete. You wouldn’t want to tangle with

creepy-crawly seen close up, or so peculiar in their

this kid. Behind a bowling ball or any other object.

juxtapositions, bring to mind her fascinating essay

My favourite of all the self-reflections is the

asking us to beware of the domestic object, written

one in the mirror, where, paradoxically, you have

for the Charles Ratton show in 1937. And some of

the feeling you are contemplating the real Lucy

the distanced still lifes, like the one shown on the

rocks (pl. 26), give us the sense of something not

scandalous: if it isn’t sufficiently scandalous, it will

worked through. A highly disturbing experience has

absolutely change nothing about the way we see.

to be confronted in almost every one of her still

Surrealism, like many artistic movements, wanted

lifes, whether domesticated or rock-bound. These

above all to invest its energy in the revolutionary, all

rocks, like those on the edges of her island of Jersey

aspects thereof.

— where finally she and Marcel Moore had to face

In a sense, Cahun is the furthest out of the sur-

up to the German occupiers — rub against the grain

realist women photographers: we have only to see

of our own envisioning. This is surrealist confronta-

the way she places her head under the glass bow!:

tion with the ordinary set in the extraordinary, and

no less disturbing than Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar, to my

it works precisely as off-putting in the extreme.

way of thinking. Claude Cahun is a highly disturbing

And, as we know, surrealism was never anything

figure among these photographing women. That

but extreme: thus its affection for the far-out, the

she was so close to such interesting others, such as

Fig. 15 Claude Cahun Self-portrait, c. 1928

Fig. 16 Dora Maar

(aka Henriette Theodora Markovitch) Sans titre (Main-coquillage) [Untitled

(Hand and Shell)], 1934

Henri Michaux, Robert Desnos, and, above all, my

once very great friend now in the sky somewhere, Jacqueline Lamba. Her photographs of Jacqueline (pl. 29), with

and without Andre Breton, are especially attentionseizing. The way Jacqueline — whose very slim body

we are familiar with from the photograph in £

Breton’s Mad Love,* where she is swimming about in a fish tank in the costume in which she was created

— appears with bare torso except for the black bands provocatively posed above her breasts, and

her eyes closed, is a shot of genius. It reminds me of the erotically charged bedroom photographs,

one taken either by Dora or by Picasso, of Jacqueline naked seated upon the floor, and then the other,

of her close friend Dora Maar, stately and gorgeous ona chair with a crown of flowers, with a very

blonde Jacqueline seated to Dora’s right, and facing forward, with Picasso’s shadow looming large to her side. He loomed large all right, and many were the stories Jacqueline would tell me about him, in his various moods. In one of those | found the most f

appealing, from a moment when they were all ona beach somewhere, concerned a child whose

mother was eager to have the child ask for something by Picasso, to keep as a thing of value. So the child did, and Picasso led the child down to the water, and drew, in the sand, a picture for him.

Jacqueline how to attract Breton’s attention, by

Of course the waves came up and swallowed the

appearing at the café he frequented, and so she

drawing, but the child had been given something

did. Dora’s own dramatic power of attraction was

by the painter, and was happy, as the mother was,

demonstrated when, seated in the café Les Deux

understandably, not.

Magots, she repeatedly stabbed a small knife blade

Jacqueline and Dora Maar had been good

into her black lace gloves, leaving a small residue of

friends for ages, having gone to the same art

blood upon her fingers. It was the blood, the black

school in Paris. It was Dora who had suggested to

lace, and the gloves, as well as the masochistic

Fig. 17 Dora Maar (aka Henriette Theodora Markovitch)

Pere Ubu, 1936

Ubu of 1936 (fig. 17 and pl. 61) as a postcard — probably an armadillo foetus, but she wouldn’t con-

firm this, keeping the mystery intact — her photo-

graphs captured something of the surrealist atmosphere — mysterious, unexplained, ambiguous — that no other photographer had ever or would ever be able to capture. Already two years earlier in

her Hand and Shell (originally untitled, sans titre) (fig. 16 and pl. 62), the erotic component is there, in the way the middle finger of the mannequin’s

carefully manicured hand as it emerges from a Seashell pokes a bit into the sand, under the threat-

ening storm cloud. Artifice of the human against the works of nature: very strong stuff. Her most powerful works are full of the mystery

of surrealism. One, from 1940, with two boys, one £

unsmiling boy holding upside-down the body of another Barcelona street urchin, his back to along hall with a guardian and a spear at the end, and, to his side, stairs leading nowhere, leads us in by its very iIncomprehensibility. The famous ones of a figure curled up or arched backwards in a dizzying drama of the scene that so attracted Picasso — who

series of vaults and arches, taken from the

followed her into the street and requested her

Orangerie at Versailles, provoke a dizziness in the

gloves to keep preciously.? Dora Maar was, of course, a brilliant photo-

grapher from the beginning, in her early photo-

spectator which echoes those vaults and arches:

one Is called The Pretenderof 1936 (pl. 65). Dora aar’s photographs have, all of them, a kind of mys-

graphs of Barcelona — of the Blind Man, of various

teriousness unavailable to most photographers of

treet scenes — and of the Mont-Saint-Michel and

that period in Paris. Their very inexplicability plays

ts architecture, which she did with her studio-mate,

into this overwrought feeling we often think of as

Pierre Kéfer, commissioned by the art historian

undeniably surrealist. It is the temperament of the

Germain Bazin, in 1931. Her fashion photos of the

thing.

Wn

early 1930s are undeniably strong in placement

Dora Maar’s photographs of her very good

and in spectacularity. When she became associated

friend Nusch Eluard (pl. 63), Paul Eluard’s wife,

with the surrealists, who used her famous image

who had been a circus performer and whom he

referring to Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry’s 1895 play, Pere

espoused after Gala had gone off with Salvador Dali

(what a difference, wow, in both parts of both

the mystery, her Se/fportrait with Sphinxes (pl. 72),

couples), are deeply moving. They were originally

in a Vogue studio in 1940 captures the feeling per-

attributed to Man Ray, since they were so clearly

fectly. Lee is looking to the side, with a faraway

superb in their construction and realization. In one

expression, whereas the sphinx before her is looking

of her photos of Nusch’s beautiful face there is a

right at us, with one of those antique smiles that

cobweb overlying her features, the photograph

persist for always in our memories. Lee’s left hand

captioned: ‘The Years Lie in Wait’. The resonance

just grazes her chest, in its luxurious fur cuff and

of the photograph is all the more powerful, since

dark sleeve, in contrast to the light hitting the top

Nusch died early of a heart attack, just on the day

of her head, her forehead, her right cheek and

she was to lunch with Dora Maar, for whomit was an — chin. What an odd picture, and how very telling. irreparable loss.

In any case, part of the fascination of this story £

is the women photographers photographing their good friends: Cahun and Jacqueline, Dora Maar and usch, Dora Maar and the surrealist painter, Leonor

Fini, in her black low-cut gown, her legs spread around the black cat’s head (fig. 18 and pl. 64), and the very theatrical heavy velvet curtain to her right,

setting off the drama of the whole thing. Eroticism and drama, friendship and intimacy .. . It works

as a tribute both to friendship and to the gift of a mighty talent, in all these cases. Dora Maar was, as the photographs show, very

beautiful, and not just in Picasso’s eyes, with whom she was from 1936 to 1942. No less beautiful was

Lee Miller, who began as Man Ray’s assistant and

continued as the very famous and no less photogenic photographer we know. As a photographer for Vogue, and as the one who made the heart-

rending shots of the camps with the dead victims of the Holocaust, and, infamously, as the one who posed in Hitler’s bathtub to the shock of the

observer, she was never not in the public eye. And she, like the two other women surrealist photo-

graphers at issue here, had always an air of mystery, and, it seems to me, of an interior sadness. As for Fig. 18 Dora Maar

(aka Henriette Theodora Markovitch) Léonor Fini, 1936

Fig. 19 Lee Miller Portrait of Space, 1937

of war: the photograph speaks loudly, unforgettably.

Let me end on her quite remarkable and infinitely complex Portrait of Space of 1937 (fig. 19 and pl. 77). Here a heavily framed mirror, empty of content, hangs suspended on a transparent curtain of

material, into which a diamond-shaped opening has been

roughly cut. The flaps of the cloth hang down

into the opening, beyond which there can be seen a stretch of expanse of desert, under some over-

hanging clouds. Not only

is the set-up allusive of so

much, but it operates an enormous opening into something far beyond itself, space indeed. Space in the empty mirror like a picture frame, into which anything could be put, or then nothing, and space beyond, perhaps a horizon towards some sea and some heaven we know nothing of. But for me it brings up one of Stéphane Mallarmé’s early poems, haunting in the same strange way in which all these women photographers were able to work. Le Pitre chatié or The Chastised Clown begins among the smoking gas footlights, then pierces the canvas

circus tent to plunge into a pool of water, only to She was good at the grotesque: take the Severed breasts from radical surgery in a place setting, from c. 1929 (pl. 74). Very surrealist indeed, and just as disturbing as one could wish. René Magritte’s eye on a plate has nothing on these. My two favorites among her photographs are the

very moving Revenge on Culture of 1940 (pl. 73), with the fallen statue’s head severed from the body at the neck, in a great gash, with the left breast

smothered under the weight of a brick, while the

find that his make-up has washed off, and that the make-up was his only genius. Here is the simpler __ first version of the text: Pour ses yeux, — pour nager dans ces lacs, dont es quais Sont plantés de beaux cils qu’un matin bleu

pénetre, J’ai, Muse, — moi, ton pitre, — enjambé la fenétre

Et fui notre baraque ou fument tes quinquets.

left arm holds a tablet, as if in protection. Useless protection, like the statue’s useless feminine

beauty. Antique culture downed by the horrors

[For her eyes, — to swim in these lakes, whose

shores

Are planted with lovely lashes pierced by a blue morning,

| have, Muse, —1, your clown, — stepped across the windowsill

And fled our tent smoking with your flares.]

world of surrealism. To go along with that claim is this one: that the kind of surprise occasioned by such photographs as those of Cahun, Maar and Miller is quite like the dramatic action of a Museappointed figure crashing through the curtain over-

head of a circus tent, and leaping into a pool, at Which becomes, in the final version, a nearly im-

which point the mask and the make-up chosen to

possible and unreadable first stanza, with a stark,

cover over the real and the ‘natural’ are torn or

cutting, and unmelodious beginning:

washed off, leaving the scandal of a desacralised gesture, desocialised and deadly. Clowning or

Yeux, lacs avec ma simple ivresse de renaitre

not, the action takes place in a dramatic scene,

Autre que l’histrion qui du geste 6voquais

tearing the polite curtain to expose the open space

Comme plume la suie ignoble des quinquets,

beyond. It was the crashing through of the circus

J’ai troué dans le mur de toile une fenétre.

tent that first started me on this trajectory, but it is

Rance nuit de la peau quand sur moi vous

the significance, and the real importance of the

passiez,

make-up over the natural that endures. Here’s the lesson | would draw from such per-

Ne sachant pas, ingrat! Que c’était tout mon

sacre, Ce fard noyé dans |’eau perfide des glaciers.

haps willful imaginings: that the particular genius of the woman photographer, especially in the magic domain of surrealism, is that ability to self-costume

[Eyes, lakes with my simple passion to be reborn

like Claude Cahun in all her various disguises of self

Other than the actor, evoking with gestures

and other, like Dora Maar to capture some mystery

For feather the ugly soot of stage lights,

of scene or figure in location and presentation, in

| have pierced a window in the canvas wall.

her usage of Barcelona and the Mont-Saint-Michel as well as in her portraits, and, like Lee Miller, to ex-

Stale night of the skin when you swept over me,

pand our sensibilities of war and peace back to

Ungrateful! Ignorant of my whole consecrations,

antiquity and on to whatever remains outside our

That grease paint drowned in faithless glacier

normal grasp and vision. They each remain photo-

water. |

graphers of genius and witnesses to the possibilities

of surrealist creation. | want to make a far-out claim, to parallel the far-

outness of the surrealist vision | have been dis-

cussing. It is this: the kind of change from the first version of the Mallarmé poem to the second, pecui ar and gripping in its peculiarity, is exactly the

kind of revolution operated in the literary and visual

Notes

1 See Caws (1997). 2 Breton (1987). 3 See Caws (2000).

The Imaging of Magic

fe surrealist sensibility has always been drawn to things exotic and enigmatic, delighting, for instance, in the state of bemusement and incipient illumination which arises within certain settings,

defined as lieux électifs— elective places, or sites conducive to the marvellous. A distinctive poetic

response Is activated by the encounter with particular locations or spatial constructions — sinister passageways or benighted avenues in the city, dark precincts with enticing porticos and alcoves, oneiric mansions, alluring corridors or labyrinths,

nocturnal parks, secret streams and clearings within woodland, mesmerising vistas and horizons.

The prospect of such locales conduces to a form

of wondering and may encourage speculation as to a latent system of magical import.

Ruminating upon his surrealist life in Paris Peasant (1926), Louis Aragon invokes a ‘metaphysics of places’ whereby a covered arcade leading off

the main boulevard — no more than a banal and shabby backwater — can open onto a domain quite alien to his everyday experience. He observes with trepidation that ‘magical precipices’ seem to open Fig.20

Eileen Agar

Rocks at Ploumanach, Brittany, 1936

up with each step forward, and finds the resulting

akin to what the ethnographer Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

vertigo to be both disquieting and irresistible. !

found in the so-called ‘primitive’ mentality of non-

In his classic study of the conditions of surreality,

European peoples and which he calls participation

La Poesie moderne et le sacré [Modern Poetry and

mystique, the capacity to engage with the world in

the Sacred] (1945), Jules Monnerot observes the

ways which are independent of logic and of normal

characteristic surrealist inclination to seek out nov-

physical conditions — a mode of transrational per-

elty and surprise in urban locations.* He suggests

ception which, so to speak, embraces metaphor as

that the fundamental surrealist stance is broadly

reality.©

congruent with the attitude toward the sacred

Now, there has arisen within the field of surreal-

and the taboo found in tribal societies; and happily

ist artmaking a lively succession of women who

compares the streets, squares, statues and subways

regularly evoke dream-places or sites of reverie:

of the modern European city to the dream-places,

as ‘angels of anarchy’, they take their bearings

the sublime summits, the sacred caves where

from prerational certainty and are accustomed to

the tribal shaman seeks out his vision and where

dwelling in conditions of magical arousal, as if trans-

revelation inheres in the inspired convergence

ported on the vehicle of metaphor as it rolls forward

of person and place. For it is in the city that mod-

and dispenses its fruits. Their art tends to favour

ern man, to quote Aragon, Is prone to ‘raising

particular kinds of locales, including landscapes,

paradoxical temples to celebrate his errors and

cityscapes and architectural structures (both ex-

enigmas’.

teriors and interiors); and their creative approach

Monnerot posits an aspiration to /e sacré [the

involves the implementation of certain visual proce-

sacred] as being essential to the poetic sensibility

dures — such as atmospheric colouring, distortion

in modern times, and insists on the centrality to

and formal ambiguity — which reproduce those

surrealism of the primal thrill of being transported,

effects of singularization, allurement, metamor-

ravished even, by the non-rational impulses set in

phosis and eroticisation which are the further out-

motion by what he calls /’insolite—the unwonted,

come of the surreal encounter described above.

the utterly unexpected and unprecedented. ‘The

Tantalizingly, their art seeks to disclose a secondary

insolite is located at the level of the affective shock,

dimension of reality, a surreality which inheres

the rupture with the foreseen, a brusque shift of

within certain sets of spatial co-ordinates and rises

level, an imbalance which paralyses the mecha-

into focus at the point of coincidence of perception

nisms of habit.’* The outcome of this encounter

and imagination. As an evangelist for the mythic

is that the individual loses track of the distinction

consciousness of surrealism, Aragon had spoken of

between the objective and the subjective, the real

his awareness ‘of an unexplained coherence and its

and the imaginary: for Monnerot, this state is the

reverberations within my heart’.’

empirical foundation of true surrealist experience.?

The technical formula itself can at times be of

Yet such a state is not simply passive, for it entails

the simplest. In two similar photos, Eileen Agar’s

an alert receptivity to outer stimuli. It is arguably

Rocks at Ploumanach, Brittany (1936) (fig. 20 and

pl.7) and Lee Miller’s Cock Rock (1939) (fig. 21

to a thrilling differentness, an enthralling indecisive-

and pl. 75), a certain perspective upon geological

ness or polymorphousness. It may be noted that marginal or liminal places

structure has been captured by the camera. Its effect is to persuade the viewer to accept the

— zones of transition between separate realms,

innate capacity of a natural form to mimic some

such as earth and water — are well-known locales of

other form; or, to put it another way, the photo of a

magic, settings which provoke startling breaks in

rock is presented both as the record of a specific

the continuum of habitual perception. The surreal-

individual object and, simultaneously, as an invita-

ist passion fo = popular culture is nourished above all

tion to see in it something else (a grotesque face, a

on the tempting mirages furnished by the shop win-

cock’s comb, even a swelling phallus). Other images

dow, the waxworks museum, the fairground hall

of coastlines and stones — such as Claude Cahun’s

of mirrors, the flickering screens of early cinema.

undoctored View over Rocks (undated) (pl.25) —

Reflections, shadows, half-closed doors, half-drawn

enact a similar appeal to analogy, as if the edge of

curtains, alcoves and peepholes — the inventory

the land were a zone especially conducive to trans-

of surreal sites and wonders is rich and manifold,

formation, a place where known things yield readily

equalled only by the modes of representation in

surrealist art. In his autobiography, Outline, the painter Paul

Nash evokes certain places he has come to love,

places ‘whose relationship of parts creates a mystery, an enchantment, which cannot be analysed’. Despite this warning to himself, he goes on to

analyse the magic of a specific spot in Kensington Gardens which he had frequented as a child, suggesting that there was ‘a peculiar spacing in the disposal of the trees, or it was their height in relation

to these intervals, which suggested some inner

design of very subtle purpose, altogether defeating the conventional lay-out of the Gardens’.® The in-

rs

dications are that a shrewd observer might be able to tease out the precise dispositions of a given surreal location, and then reproduce it in paint,

thereby fulfilling what | take to be one of the tacit

aims of surrealist art, namely: to expose the structure of surreality as a set of recognisable and ultimately reproducible dimensions and configurations. Fig.21

Lee Miller

Cock Rock (The Native), 1939

Fig.22 Emila Medkova Eyes, 1965

The quest for an element that lurks and dis-

turbs, an element that induces a pleasure bordering upon queasiness, seems to lie at the heart of Emila

Medkova’s photographic enterprise. Her monochrome studies of bare-twigged trees suggest a natural geometry of eeriness, while her image of Eyes (1965) (fig. 22 and pl. 70) — based purely on a couple of holes gouged into a surface of crumbling plaster — encourages the illusion of a mesmerising stare, the equivalent of the gaze of the rapt visionary seized by the sacred.

The ethnographer Marcel Mauss, in a famous treatise on primitive magic, asserts the necessity

of belief in the magical system, averring that magician and public alike must share the same cer-

tainty that the ritual act will indeed ensure that rain will fall or a disease depart. On occasion, he

‘natural surreality’, taking her cue from those cher-

admits, a given sequence of ceremonial acts may

ished surprises that the external world can offer,

backfire and produce no result, but the audience’s

and moving toward an artistic equivalent of that

absorption in the process will always support the

spontaneous magic. This is to recognise the painter

collective faith, given that ‘magic is believed and

as one who adopts strategies of persuasion and

not perceived’.? As far as my analogy with surreal-

shock, not simply following a ready-made method

ist art is concerned, it is enough for the viewer

or formula, but allowing her exploring hand to

to feel in some way attachedto what is being

advance until thrilling forms begin to rise up from

made credible to the mind, when the created

the picture surface. In the first instance, she paints

image lies open to the gaze. Attentiveness is

to startle herself. And then she finds herself pos-

arguably a prerequisite for the appreciation of all

sessed, caught in the delirium of imaging, which is

art; here, a generous gazing, non-critical and flexi-

itself a magical act.

ble, can establish a state of receptivity that dis-

arms doubt and allows the magic to work. It

Dorothea Tanning demonstrates a talent for

bewildering discrepancy in her canvas Eine kleine

follows that the full impact of a surrealist picture

Nachtmusik (1943) (pl. 114). She has constructed

depends as much on the participation of the

a private oneiric corridor where young maidens

viewer as on the disposition of shapes and colours

allow themselves to be ravished by invisible winds,

within the frame.

losing their footing on normality as they grapple

My argument, then, is that the surrealist artist

operates in mimicry of what might be called

with the rhythms of a manic architecture. Here we

are shown a landing with three firmly closed doors

Fig. 23 Francesca Woodman House #3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

history as long as that of the imagination itself, and can be traced in hundreds of contexts. For example, Charles Baudelaire spoke of correspondances — the links between separate orders of material life,

often manifested as a resemblance of perceptual qualities, as when the poet compares the waves ina woman’s luxuriant hair to the restless ocean. What is distinctive to surrealism is the exacerbation

of the analogical impulse and its consecration as the very matrix of all imaginary construction, be it

material or theoretical, literary or painterly. In her admirable treatise upon the workings of the imaginative faculty, Journal de l’analogiste [The Analogist’s Diary] (1954), Suzanne Lilar offers the example of a dull avenue in Antwerp which under moonlight became the Grand Canal in Venice. When she reflects upon this mirage, she observes that her fictive Canal is actually more noble, more

sumptuous, than the real thing, which, so to speak, acks the power to be more than itself. Lilar delights in what she calls ‘the bemusement, the giddiness,

and a fourth slightly ajar. Remedios Varo’s Insomnia

the delicious insecurity’ of such moments, and

(1947) (pl. 123) depicts a similar interior: this time

posits a coherent network of echoes and equiva-

the doors open successively onto further open

lences which subtends such revelations and con-

doors, suggesting a meandering progress toward

duces to what she terms ‘metaphysical pleasure’.'

revelation. Taking its cue from the gothic novel,

In surrealism, the play of spatial perception

Surrealist art loves to dwell in spaces which harbour

often deploys allusions to the human body, pro-

a mesmeric otherness, unexplained yet compelling.

ducing the key metaphor of body-as-landscape

Thus Francesca Woodman contrives a fine photo of

(or landscape-as-body). In her canvas Scylla (1938)

a bare-floored room in such a state of disarray that

(pl. 33), Ithell Colquhoun offers a seductive image

the person leaning at the window dissolves into

of fusion. She portrays a woman taking a bath, but

the daylight flooding in (House #3, 1976) (fig. 23

does so in terms of a scene drawn from nature, ask-

and pl. 125).

ing us to see a pair of legs as ifthey were two rocks

It can be said that a fundamental mechanism

emerging from the sea. Her title alludes, of course,

of thought based on analogy operates in surrealist

to the classical myth of Scylla and Charybdis, the

art, as in surrealist writing. This mechanism has a

monster and the maelstrom, also figured as two

Fig. 24 Valentine Penrose Ariane, 1934-42

dangerous crags between which Odysseus must

sail on his epic homeward journey. While making a cultural allusion to extreme risk-taking, Colguhoun’s

painting equally lulls the viewer into a sense of security, for there is something ultimately reassuring about the idea of lolling in a warm bath-tub. Associations of warmth, comfort and a certain volupf

tuousness begin to emerge, as the eye glimpses a boat arriving and then lingers over the anemone which rests upon the bather’s sex, half-occluded

below the water-line. The erotic resonances are confirmed in the phallic outlines of the woman’s knees and thighs. Immersion in water, the classic medium of

metamorphosis," features again in a painting by Léonor Fini called The Ends of the Earth (1948) (pl. 46), where a female with a magnificent mane of hair stands up to her breasts in an inky pool, upon

which float the skulls of nameless birds. Here, there is perhaps a hint of straining, as if the artist felt

The title of Valentine Penrose’s collage Ariane

(1934-42) (fig. 24 and pl. 97) makes another

that still water alone were not enough to hasten

reference to classical myth, the tale of Theseus

the advent of the surreal: | feel her bird skulls to

and his lover, Ariadne. However, it’s not clear which

be a panicky redundancy, a symptom of ‘trying too

of the two women depicted is the Ariadne of the

hard’. Here lies the difference between magic and

title. What we can see is a menacing sea-creature

a mere conjuring trick. A more convincing strategy

behind the taller woman as she stands upon some

would have been to simplify the scene, leaving

sort of divan draped in a heavy cover. Both women

room for the unspoken. The same artist’s The

are dressed with incongruous decorum, presum-

Parasol (1947) (pl. 43) is more tellling. It depicts a

ably in defiance of the material context of untrust-

woman’s parasol as some sort of stricken creature,

worthy shingle and imminent tide. Their lack of

upturned to expose its torn underside. The rip in

concern is bewitching, because frustratingly inex-

the fabric reveals a complex armature of struts

plicable: the surreal effect inheres in our percep-

and supports, suggestive of elaborate underwear,

tion of a danger to which they seem indifferent,

while the tear itself may hint at a violent sexual

and this discrepancy is what irritates our rational

encounter. | find it a disturbing image because of

mind. Yet if we but set aside our programmed

Fini’s discretion in not spelling out its metaphoric

response, we may glimpse a secondary dimension

latency.

to the scenario.

Yet another classical myth is figured in Mimi

artists of surrealism. At heart it consists in a trans-

Parent’s Leda and the Swan (1997) (fig. 25 and

ference of subjective affect onto external form,

pl. 94), where the erotic embrace makes the

a projection of auraonto the object such that it

woman seem herself to be growing wings. Ina

shakes off its ordinariness and partakes of the mar-

more daring metaphoric fusion, The Holy Spirit

vellous. What obtains in Miller’s treatment of a rock

(1965) (pl. 49), Jane Graverol alludes to.the notion

in the Egyptian desert or Agar’s approach to a for-

of orgasm as a sensation of ecstatic flying by

mation on an-Atlantic shore obtains likewise in the

converting the mons veneris into a black bird on

auraticisation of quite ordinary objects from every-

the wing.

day life. The conversion of items of clothing, shoes,

Elsewhere in his delineation of the surrealist

utensils and other bric-a-brac into sources of

project, Jules Monnerot raises the topic of fetishisa-

enchantment is but a variant on the notion of the

tion. He speaks of the way human beings nominate

surrealised locale. In this respect, surrealist still lifes

certain material objects as containers of metaphysi-

can be seen as miniaturised landscapes, close-ups

cal meaning, as it were injecting into the inert thing

of intimate spaces conducive to disorientation and

a secret vibrancy, so that they are subsumed within

the vertigo of the uncanny. Meret Oppenheim’s

f£

a system of magical correspondences.!* The proce-

notorious Object (Breakfast in Fur) (1936) (fig. 9) —

dure arises as spontaneously in the case of f children

also the subject of her later collage Souvenir of

at play as it does in that of tribal sorcerers or the

Breakfast in Fur (p|.91) — represents a proposition perfectly poised between metaphor and actuality. The viewer’s eyes, yet also lips, yearn to linger close

to the velvety surround of the familiar teacup, as if about to touch and taste. It is amusing to learn that Oppenheim went to a shop to buy the fur of a

Chinese gazelle in order to realize her original construction, the idea for which had cropped up in a

conversation with Picasso." It would be instructive to compare her ‘wrapping’ treatment with the

photographic technique of solarisation, invented by Man Ray and Lee Miller, whereby the brief introduc-

tion of light into the darkroom creates a dark margin around the depicted figure. Millers Solarized

Portrait (1930) (pl. 85) is an example of wilful aurati-

cisation."4 Both Lee Miller, in Revenge on Culture (1940)

(pl. 73) and Emilia Medkova, in an untitled photograph of 1948 (pl. 69), focus their lens upon a stone Fig.25

Mimi Parent Léda et le cygne [Leda and the Swan], 1997

Fig.26

Jane

Graverol

La Prison céleste {|The Celestial Prison], 1963

carving of a fallen angel, lying fortuitously amid debris or against a stone wall. | feel

the angelic

object is being partly mocked, partly cherished; there is no more

gentle

than a whiff of the

YCONGFUOUS,

a

hint rather than an overbearing exclamation.

Jane Graverol’s The Celestial Prison

(1963) (fig. 26

and pl. 48) places a delicate angel within a birdcage as ifgently to query its status as a material iF

object. Eileen Agar combines enigma with extrava-

gance in Angel of Anarchy (1936-40) (pl. 3),!° is entirely enshrouding a plaster bust with knotted silks and feather . Her title could be construed as a surNn

realist programme in miniature, with its promise of an outrageous fusion of the sacred and the dissident. Another startling image is Francesca Woodman’s photographic self-portrait “On Being

an Angel #1” (1977) (pl. 127), where she elides her lower body, leaving her breasts and head to float disconcertingly in a black void. Here, the rhetorical device of synecdoche — showing the part in lieu of the whole — creates a variant form of hinting, a teasing eroticism that hovers between the desirable

and the grotesque. But we should by now have realized that the surrealist bid for our attention is more than gratuitous teasing. Admittedly there is flippancy in some Surrealist images: the collective game of exquisite

corpse can seem no more than an idle toying with surprise, a bit of fun rather than a concerted engagement with deeper mysteries. Furthermore,

thing more profound and indeed poignant. Surreal-

as | have hinted, an artist may experience lapses of

ist art can even come close to the sublime in its

vision, as when she lays a clumsy stress upon a stock

= quest for a metaphysical or mythic e/sewhere, dis-

device, or makes too much of an incongruity of

covering that the door flung open or the curtain

scale, or delivers an overload of irrational con-

drawn

aside can disclose something terrible,

trivances. Despite such disappointments, there are

beyond our capacity to apprehend. The true sacred

times when the painted image verges upon some-

can be harrowing. Yet, in suggesting that the

surrealists were obsessed with escaping from

and fearsome. Obviously such imaging reflects the

routine existence, Jules Monnerot maintains that

photographer’s craftsmanship and control, though

‘for the surrealist “spirit”, the expectation of the

| think there is no specific surrealist device in play;

insolite is an expectation of deliverance, a yearning

or rather, the subject embodies a sufficient quo-

for plenitude’.'° The statement prompts the ques-

tient of the magical for it to need no additional

tion whether, in surrealist art, the female sensibility

trickery. Perhaps the best of surrealist art mini-

is more inclined to envisage the sacred as a pleni-

mizes artifice, as if the purest act of magic were

tude, in contrast to a male prospect of tragic yearn-

to consist in pointing to what Is simply there,

ing and a desperate vacuum. (lam thinking of

unadorned.

the late Tanguy’s infinity of cold, piled stones and the desperate graveyard inertia of De Chirico’s

cityscapes.) | dare say everything turns upon the surrealist disposition to press urgently forward. Rather than

be satisfied with an impromptu snapshot of Nusch

Notes

1 See ‘Le Passage de l’Opéra’, in Aragon (1926). 2 Monnerot (1945), 151. Monnerot’s argument draws on concepts borrowed from the ethnographers Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Franz

Eluard — such as Lee Miller’s holiday photo of a

Boas.

laughing woman beside a car (pl. 79) — Dora Maar

Aragon (1926), 124. Monnerot (1945), 124

invites her sitter into the studio and asks her to adopt a dramatic pose with her hands held before

Monnerot (1945), 154. Lucien WwW & au

Lévy-Bruhl meditates at length on participation mystique in Lévy-Bruhl (1975) 109-110. Among his examples is that of

her face (Nusch Eluard, c. 1935) (fig. 27 and

the Australian aboriginal tracker who strikes his spear into the

pl. 63). The woman’s hair is long — it may even be a wig — and has been carefully waved to impart an impression of queenliness; the large, stagey ring

on one hand accentuates this. The careful lighting divides the face into interesting zones of light and shade, as well as seeming to detach it from the body, which recedes into darkness. There is some-

thing of auratic beauty emerging here, something which transcends the natural prettiness of Paul

paw-print of the kangaroo and thereby prefigures the outcome of the hunt. 7 Aragon (1926), 9.

8 9 10 11

Nash (1988), 35. Mauss (1972), 96-97. Lilar (1954), 14, 40, 45. Asacompendium of classical myths of metamorphosis, Ovid’s Metamorphoses contains a high percentage of aquatic transformations, as, for instance, in the tales of the nymphs Cyane and

Arethusa, who both end up dissolving into water.

12 See Monnerot (1945), 151.

13 See Curiger (1989), 39. 14 The sitter of this portrait has often been identified as Meret

Eluard’s wife and muse. Above all, her delicate fin-

Oppenheim herself, but | find the facial features not quite con-

gers, with their nails pressed into the softness of

vincing. Moreover, if the date of 1930 is to be believed, one

the face, encourage us to imagine caressing this perfect skin. At the same time, the fingernails hint

at the possibility of a defensive reaction of scratching — so that the woman appears both desirable

needs to consider that Oppenheim was a schoolgirl of seventeen at the time. Furthermore, she left Switzerland for Paris only in

May 1932. 15 This second version of the Angel of Anarchyisdated 1940-43 in Agar’s book A Look at my Life (see Agar [1988], pp. 127-28). 16 Monnerot (1945), 127.

Fig.27 Dora Maar

(aka Henriette Theodora Markovitch)

Nusch Eluard, c. 1935

Safe as Houses: Anamorphic Bodies in Ordinary Spaces: Miller, Varo, Tanning, Woodman

ler identified with their bodies and familiar with

The Ambassadors (1533), uses anamorphosis to

the use of the female body as a symbol for every-

emphasize the mortality that haunts all human

thing from motherhood to beauty and justice,

endeavors through the distorted painting of a skull

women artists connected to surrealism embraced

at the feet of two magnificently appointed men.

this cultural trope by representing women’s bodies

Surrealist anamorphosis invokes double realities

in multiple ways. Representations of women in

for the purpose of highlighting the extent to which

houses, women as houses, allowed women artists

Our unconscious minds inform our waking realities.

to question a woman’s relation to a house as a safe

For women surrealists who are painting and photo-

haven and the inevitability of a woman’s confine-

graphing women and houses, the alternating reali-

ment to it.! They question the equation of women

ties come back to cultural assumptions about their

with houses by embracing the double reality antici-

social roles: maintaining a house is safe for whom,

pated by André Breton’s definition of surrealityin

they might be asking, and what sort of alternatives

the Manifesto of Surrealism as ‘the future resolution

might be preferable?

of these two states, dream and reality, which are

When the surrealists invented the exquisite

seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute

corpse game in the late 1920s and began to draw

reality’.* Visually such a double reality might best be

these strange bodies as group activities they showed

represented through anamorphosis, from the Greek

that surrealist automatism had changed the familiar

or form seen backwards or understood retrospec-

parameters of the human body (fig. 28 and pls. 131-

f

tively, which requires looking at an image twice to

33, 137-41). First created as a group poem according

see the co-existing realities embedded within it: a

to which each person added a word to a sentence in

irst impression, which, when glimpsed again from

linear fashion, without knowing what words came

a shifted perspective, takes on a new aspect.’ The

before or after, and named after the first sentence to

most famous anamorphic painting, Hans Holbein’s

be created this way (the exquisite corpse will drink

the new wine!) the exquisite corpse game evolved

Desnos’s nocturnal bottle and Eluard’s house

into group drawings that unfolded vertically and

stand as unusual figures for the body in automatic

yielded bodies as exquisitely uncanny as a corpse able

writing by surrealist men in which the body is mostly

to enjoy new wine. Such inert bodies appeared para-

absent. For women, however, the representation

doxically sentient: intimately strange, oddly familiar.

of surrealist experience as embodied was quite com-

The automatic experience of a body that feels

mon.° Women tended to be identified with their

simultaneously familiar and strange, awake and

bodies in surrealism, as the anonymous photograph

asleep, was well captured by Paul Eluard with the

L’Ecriture automatique from a 1927 cover of La

image of the body as a house through which words

Révolution surréaliste— of a woman dressed as a

slip in The Word, a poem in which the automatic

school girl poised to take dictation — attests. Bodies

experience of feeling words rush through the body

house the automatic experience, after all, as

is figured at the liminal moment of falling asleep as

Desnos’s and Eluard’s images confirm and women

the sun sets, casting its shadow across the house’s

surrealist artists demonstrate. Furthermore, women

facade with windows figured as slowly shutting eyes. Robert Desnos, in /f You Only Knew, represents the automatic experience as a body in the shape of a

‘nocturnal bottle’ the poet could see into from the outside and glimpse a baroque space that was at

once as familiar as the self and as vast as the constellated sky.* The poet’s nocturnal bottle captures a shooting star: “He corks It instantly to watch the star enclosed within the glass, the constellations come to

life against the sides’.° This surrealist coincidence of overlapping realities, of the self as a being anda

thing, opaque and transparent, mortal and timeless, may be understood as another example of anamor-

phosis, whereby the link between the two images, the outline they share and that distinguishes one from the other, functions as the in-between mirror-

ing point between inside and outside. In the case of Desnos’s body-bottle the mirroring point is the glass

skin that reflects back a known body while allowing glimpses of an unknown universe improbably contained within it through the mechanisms of dream and trance, lying just beyond the familiar parameters of the known world. Fig.28 André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba,

Yves Tanguy Cadavre exquis [Exquisite Corpse], 1938

artists show how strange worlds may be folded into

and a projection. This is indeed a portrait of a body

otherwise ordinary spaces. They explore the equa-

experiencing space, clothed by a screen and ren-

tion of

dered self-aware by the frame-mirror. We need only

awoman with domestic space and question

the perception of such a link as natural.

make a shift in perception to see the inner and outer

realities as reflections of each other, with the tentbody’s screen-skin as the delimiting outline. In its

With Portrait of Space from 1937 (pl. 77), Lee Miller

transparence it resembles the glass skin of Desnos’s

uses her characteristic skill with cropping and

bottle-body or the unsilvered glass metaphorically

framing to create the illusion that a view from a

dividing the unconscious from consciousness in the

screened window in fact represents a perspective

first surrealist automatic text, The Magnetic Fields.

from inside a torn desert tent.’ Furthermore, the

The inner-outer spaciousness of Miller’s anamorphic

impression thus created is so powerful that she

body is further magnified by a large bird-shaped

invites a secondary illusion founded on the sense

cloud on the horizon, which also underscores the

that the view from inside the tent is equivalent to

tent-body’s nomadic mobility.®

a view looking outwards from inside a human body.

Miller’s abstracted yet tangible vision of a body

In effect, the portrait of the title personifies a desert

as space conforms visually with Michel Foucault’s

tent looking outward with a torn screen for a skin; it

formulation of surrealist automatism from an inter-

emphasizes the extent to which this body’s experi-

view prompted by Breton’s death in 1966: ‘The

ence is dominated by a Desnosian sense of vast

ethic of writing no longer comes from what one has

inner space in harmony with an equally vast outer

to say, from the ideas that one expresses, but from

space. At eye level hangs a tilted frame resembling a

the very act of writing. In that raw and naked act,

mirror which we suddenly realize could virtually con-

the writers’ freedom is fully committed at the same

tain the ghost of a reflection of the photographer

time as the counteruniverse of words takes form...

herself looking through her lens at the frame, which

Breton, a swimmer between two words, traverses

would allow the tent to enclose her like a double for

an imaginary space that had never been discovered

her own body. It also potentially reflects the viewer,

before him’.? That ‘raw and naked act’ for Foucault

situating us within the tent and positioning us look-

was linked to a direct notion of experience: ‘what

ing outwards, intensifying the personification of the

we really owe to him alone is the discovery of a

title. For Miller’s tent-body looks inward, with the

space that is not that of philosophy, nor of litera-

frame-mirror standing in as a metaphor for se/f-

ture, nor of art, but that of experience. We are now

reflection, at the same time as it looks outward

in a time when experience — and the thought that

towards the empty desert, in tune with its spacious

is inseparable from it — are developing with an

surroundings. We see the space from the title first

extraordinary richness, in both a unity and a disper-

only through the screen; it takes the frame to re-

sion that wipe out the boundaries of provinces that

adjust our perspective and clarify how that space Is

were once well established’.'° Miller’s personifica-

inner, as well, that we are seeing both a reflection

tion of the act of looking concentrates on this

Fig.29 Remedios Varo Insomnia, 1947

intensity of experience that typifies surrealist

automatism as a wiping out of boundaries between ‘provinces that were once well established’. It serves as a positive metaphor for surrealist receptivity to creativity, the desired openness to what emerges from within, to a sense of coincidence with what is outside. Portrait of Space typifies what Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron has identified as the surrealists’ fascination with the inside-out/upside-down experience of automatism, of the liminal position separating the sayable from the unsayable, language from tongue, inside thought from outward expression —

two views of the same experience."

After World War Il, Remedios Varo earned a living painting advertisements for pharmaceutical com-

panies.'* She had fled Europe with her companion,

wakeful, inhabit these rooms. In the front room the

Breton’s close friend Benjamin Péret, and found

sparkling wings of two oddly over-sized dragonflies

refuge in Mexico City where she also found friend-

mirror the candle’s light as though the light itself

ship with fellow surrealist artist Leonora Carrington.

had magically incarnated them.

Varo painted Insomnia in 1947 for Bayer (fig. 29 and

Varo projects the viewer’s Insomnia by enticing

pl. 123), an eerie representation of a waking dream,

us to experience the state of mind described by the

the state Bayer’s products are intended to cure but

title. She tricks the viewer into seeing double then

that surrealists prize. Insomnia portrays an oddly

triple: we suddenly experience the ghostly effect

empty interior space animated by the ghostly

of the animated light through her visual sleight of

feminine presence of three pairs of floating eyes

hand based on resemblance which invites us to see

that lead the viewer deeper and deeper into the

a continuation of the flame’s shape in the double

shadows. We see a lit candle on a table in a large,

pair of dragonfly wings. As in Miller’s Space, multi-

otherwise empty room beyond which three door-

ple aspects of the self inhabit this psychological

ways open onto other, smaller rooms creating an

space, which invites the viewer, particularly the

uncanny sense of limitless space folded into what

female viewer, to enter and inhabit it as if it were

ought to be a contained, domestic interior.

her own. It is our own eyes, made restless by the

Insomnia places the viewer in the position of a

coincident resemblances, which see the floating

sleep-deprived person prone to hallucination: only

pairs of eyes, also in a set of three, as if they were so

the pairs of floating feminine eyes, at once sad and

many familiar ghosts. The candle in the foreground

practically invites the viewer seeking sleep to pick

into a series of works evocative of the claustropho-

it up, move away from the over-sized dragonflies

bia she felt in the desert heat, portrayed as the

and this simultaneously familiar and unreal setting

bounded space of hotel hallways populated by

practically devoid of furniture, and penetrate

young girls. Tanning discovered surrealism at the

deeper into the multiplying rooms beyond, lured

Museum of Modern Art’s Fantastic Art, Dada, and

by the beckoning pairs of feminine eyes to a place

Surrealism show in late 1936. ‘Here is the infinitely

where darkness reigns, portending rest and a

faceted world | must have been waiting for’, she

possible return to normalcy. Perhaps a soothing

explains in her autobiographies. ‘Here, gathered

Space lies there, a place where eyes remain safely

inside an innocent concrete building, are signposts

enclosed within their heads. The strangeness of the

SO imperious, so laden, so seductive, and, yes, so

setting, however, suggests a more sinister destina-

perverse that ... they would possess me utterly’."°

tion: a place to be avoided, where nightmares

She first came in contact with the surrealist group

replace dreams.

when her future husband Max Ernst selected her

For Varo the experience of sleep in this painting

painting Birthday for a show of women artists in

overlaps with wakefulness. One reality, embodied by

New York City at the influential gallery of his then

the candle, anamorphically transforms into an alter-

wife Peggy Guggenheim in the early 1940s; they

nate reality, indicated by the oversized dragonfly

later moved out west where she painted Eine kleine

wings. Waking and dreaming, what we see and what

Nachtmusik in 1943 (fig. 30 and pl. 114).

we only think we see, may coexist; the marvelous

and the everyday coincide in a house that poten-

Tanning’s paintings redefine domestic space for young women as claustrophobic, haunted by

tially poses as much of a threat as it does domestic

malevolent spirits: ‘we are waging a desperate bat-

safety. Contained space can become infinite, with

tle with unknown forces’, she writes.'* The anamor-

one door leading to another indefinitely. The end of

phosis of her domestic interiors resides in their ordi-

this journey may not be happy or restful. By showing

nariness combined with extraordinary variations

an interior space that appears to contain folded

on the familiar trope of the woman in the house, a

within it spaces as infinite as wakefulness, in addition

place that, in Tanning’s view, a woman desires to

to promoting a pharmaceutical solution to sleep-

escape. In Eine kleine Nachtmusik, young girls are

lessness Varo’s painting asks what is meant by the

shown in apparent combat with a gigantic sun-

phrase ’safe as houses’. She suggests that for a

flower, the emblematic flower of the surrealist

woman such a superficially innocuous feminized

movement since the publication of Breton’s poem

space may not necessarily yield comfort.

Sunflower from 1923 and his explanation, eleven

years later in Mad Love, that this poem prophesied the night he met his second wife, Jacqueline In Sedona, Arizona, where Miller photographed her

Lamba." These young girls come right out of the

kneeling in front of a painting in progress (pl. 78),

American West with their worn Victorian-style

Dorothea Tanning poured her vision of surrealism

dresses and boots. The sentient sunflower, a little

Fig. 30 Dorothea Tanning Eine kleine Nachtmusik, 1943

worse for wear, is losing ground to them: one of the girls holds a petal in her hand; the other, so electrified by her struggle with the flower that her long hair stands straight up, clutches an offshoot of its stalk. Her well-rooted stance shows defiance. She blocks the sunflower’s passage down the hallway, forcing it back. Tanning wipes out the boundaries between plant and human, recognizing only the

category alive. Anything but ordinary, this familiar space fails to contain these girls, it serves as the location for their play in the form of battles they

fight to win. The girls’ sensuality is clearly communicated

‘is to depict their interactions to the boundaries of

by their body language and by the night music of

these spaces’.'° If Breton, whom Woodman read

the title, a reference to Mozart and to the ecstatic

attentively, could be described by Foucault as a

expression on the face of the girl who leans, eyes

‘swimmer between two words’, Woodman, through

closed, against a doorway, the sunflower’s petal

her series of narrative pictures that capture some of

firmly gripped in her fist. She could be listening to

the uncanny feel of the photographs from Breton’s

the sensual night sounds emanating from behind

Nadja (1928), could be called a ‘swimmer between

the hotel room door. The young woman in the fore-

two images’.'’ For her the ‘raw and naked’

ground has had her strength enhanced by battle;

experience of automatism takes place in crumbling

she shows how young women can stand up to

domestic spaces not unlike Tanning’s hotel hallways

Bretonian surrealism and not be limited by it. They

and as empty as Varo’s rooms.

can take turns in redefining what it means to be a

Of the photographs in her House series showing

woman in the group, capable of re-establishing the

a woman’s body vanishing into, or emerging from,

visual ground.

a house, the most striking is entitled simply House

#3 (1976) (pl. 125). We see a corner of a room delimited by large windows with torn wallpaper Francesca Woodman frequently used her own body

strewn across the old, uneven floorboards with the

in her photographic series from the 1970s to show

edge of a mantle showing on the left-hand side.

an escape from domestic space. Woodman’s bod-

There is no furniture in the room. In the centre of

ies blend into the dilapidated house in Providence,

the photograph, beneath the corner window

Rhode Island, she used as a setting. As a student

through which daylight streams, we see a foot

at the Rhode Island School of Design she became

wearing a Chinese slipper of the sort women wore

‘interested in the way people relate to space.

inthe 1970s. Above the foot and lower leg we catch

The best way to do this’, she wrote in her journal,

only a blur, as though the foot had emerged from

the floor’s baseboard, as though the house itself

feels as a body as opposed to how one /ooks’.*° This

were alive. Only on closer examination can the

body is caught between articulation and disarticula-

blurred outline of a head and crouching body be

tion before our eyes, appearing to move effortlessly

glimpsed above the foot, with another foot hooked

between dimensions. Like Miller she emphasizes

around the ankle. The living body represents the

the creative aspect of inner spaciousness. The auto-

anamorphic ghost in this image — unlike the skull in

matic possibilities of creativity grounded for her in

Holbein’s work. The first impression of having seen

domestic space that, like Varo’s, holds the unfamil-

the ghost of a former inhabitant, of a young woman

iar infinite within finite banalities, redefines what it

alive only within the limits of the house, dominates.

means to live in a body in a space that, while inti-

Although the ghostliness of this body blending into an old house could be aligned with the gothic

mate, reveals its most hidden, perhaps even terrifying, aspects.

tradition, Woodman herself described her work as baroque: ‘Me and Francis Bacon and all those Baroques are all concerned with making something soft

These portraits of women /n houses, women as

wiggle and snake around a hard architectural out-

houses, share in common a narrative thread that

line’.'® For her the vast incongruities of baroque

conforms to the cultural expectation that a woman

space, of the way it can spill out while folding in

will be identified by her body, with her body, and

on itself, were more structurally enticing than the

that the most logical space for that body will be

domestic gothic. The domestic was simply the

domestic, typified by a house. To be a woman

domain with which she was most familiar, as it had

raised with the commonplace that the house is a

been for Varo and Tanning, but there was nothing

safe and natural place for her inspired these artists

particularly ordinary or safe about it. By portraying

to provide visual commentaries on female bodies in

herself as a ghost in an old house Woodman enacts

domestic spaces suggestive of inner worlds enfold-

this aspect of baroque infinite space — at once

ing other worlds. The notion that we all live a

wrapped into a clearly bounded perimeter and

double life, a dream life and a waking one, was fun-

simultaneously infinite, through the boundlessness

damental to surrealism and it was Breton’s desire in

of the blurred body which could be the house or

the Manifesto to hope for a future resolution of the

could be escaping from it through the chimney,

two states.*' This double sensation of existing on

or streaming into it by means of the light pouring

two planes, inside and outside, asleep and awake,

through the window.

right-side-up and upside-down, was described by

Through her deployment of baroque space

Breton and Desnos as the marvellous — a notion

Woodman comes close to Miller’s Portrait of Space,

long associated with the baroque and also with

where the inside and outside are separated only by

Desnosian surrealism.*¢ It turns on the paradoxical

the skin-like membrane of the screen. George Baker

discovery in the outer world of aspects of the inner

has remarked that the tactile dimension of

self, characterized, in the earliest days of experi-

Woodman’s photographs emphasizes ‘what one

mentation with automatism, by inner voices: ‘we...

have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so

houses’? Not on your life, Miller, Varo, Tanning and

many echoes’, confirms Breton in the Manifesto.*?

Woodman respond, showing aspects of their expe-

In the hands of Miller, Varo, Tanning and Woodman

rience as they swim between images the way that

that inner self and its imaginary doubles are

Foucault showed us that Breton had swum between

transposed from sound to image, the dictated

words.

words passing through a woman’s body to the page from the photograph Ecriture automatique transformed into ghostly presences glimpsed anamor-

phically within the houses they portray. These houses retain aspects of those in which they were raised to believe their destinies resided, even as the

Notes

1 Louise Bourgeois, although not connected to surrealism, also painted women as partial houses in the 1940s with her Femme

work itself helps them to break free.

Departing from the exquisite corpse tradition of destabilizing the familiar body and embracing the

Maison series.

2 Breton (1972), 14. 3 See Conley (2001). 4 Desnos’s sense of time was fundamentally baroque. For more on

the baroque as a ‘methodological lever’ see Maffesoli (1990), 154.

surrealist appreciation for both the haunted gothic

and the spacious baroque, these women artists made the surrealist marvellous in everyday life their

5 Desnos (2007), 157. 6 See Conley (1996). 7 Shots taken before and after Miller’s final version of Portrait of Space reveal that this image features a window, not a tent.

own by transposing the surrealist acceptance of the anamorphic co-existence of separate realities — the

See Haworth-Booth (2007). 8 | have argued elsewhere that this giant cloud bird may have inspired Mir6 beyond his purported inspiration for his painting

living and the dead, the rational and the haunted,

Le Baiser from this photograph, as Antony Penrose argues in

the familiar and the uncanny — into that most rec-

ognizable emblem for familiarity and safety, the woman’s body and her house. They reveal how unfamiliar such a place can be when the artist’s consciousness inhabiting it isa woman’s. These

women artists made strange the structures their

culture expected would define them. They take the surrealist tendency to view reality anamorphically and apply it to their own bodies and to the houses

connected to them by culture and thus expose

9 0 11 2 3

Penrose (1985), 69. Foucault (1998), 173. Ibid. See Chénieux-Gendron (2002). For more on Varo see Kaplan (1988). Tanning (1986), 73. Tanning (2001), 49. Tanning’s first autobiography, Birthday, is more poetic than the updated version, Between Lives, it is also out of print. | refer to both here.

4 Tanning (1986), 180. Tanning (2001), 336. 5 Breton (1987), 39-67.

6 Townsend (2006), n.p. 7 See Berne (2004) and Gabhart (1986). 8 Cited in Davison (2000), 110.

19 Wylie Sypher explains how baroque space ‘arises from a contra-

both the creative potential in a house’s ordinariness

diction: first, setting monumental limits and seeming to perform

and its most stifling propensities. A location for

a heroic feat of liberation. Infinity is the boldest baroque illusion.

transformative activities — playing, dreaming, or waging a battle for survival — the house is a known place for women that surrealist anamorphosis helps them to acknowledge and then reinvent. ‘Safe as

Actually, however, baroque encloses its areas firmly’. Sypher

(1955), 214. 20 George Baker in Sundell (2003), 63. 21 Breton (1972), 14.

22 See Conley (2003). 23 Breton (1972), 27-28.

Women

Surrealists

and the Still Life

WANA

presented with a series of objects ina

composition — whether fruit, flowers, or a china teacup and saucer — we are presented with a

different way of looking at the world. In a still life, objects are represented for themselves; we see details without any obvious anecdotal reference or

narratival frame. Often drawing on the power of trompe l'oeil to trick the eye into seeing the twodimensional as fantastically three-dimensional, the

still life presents the real without the appearance

of the reality maker. In its familial and domestic subject-matter, focus on the private space, emphasis On experience and contemplation, and refutation of the masterly gaze, we might also describe this genre as inherently feminine. For in the Western

netaphysical tradition and the art which promoted it, historical subject-matter, public space, and the

desire to control and possess meaning are designated masculine.

Whilst the still life was effectively ‘liberated’ from the painted canvas in the twentieth century,

and took on new forms with the collage, the readyFig. 31 Claude Cahun Untitled (Still Life on Rocks), c. 1935

made object, photography, assemblage and instal-

to question rather than reinforce the normalisation

lation art, it still retained its association with the

of fetishistic looking in modern consumer society

domestic, the intimate and the feminine.! As

(from fashion mannequins, photography and maga-

Norman Bryson has documented, the still life can-

zines to ‘High’ art), to subvert the traditional male

not avoid domestic spatial trappings and its atten-

ideal, and to emphasise instead the overlooked in

dant feminine qualities. It is marked by a ‘double

art and society. They exploited the metaphysical,

edged exclusion and nostalgia, this irresolvable

magical, and malleable potential of the domestic,

ambivalence which gives to feminine space a power

using the still-life as a form of art to address mind-

of attraction intense enough to motor the entire

body, masculine-feminine, domestic-public dual-

development of still life as a genre, yet at the same

isms. Consider Eileen Agar’s view of surrealism as

time apprehends feminine space as alien, as a space

‘outer and inner eye, backward and forward, inside

which also menaces the masculine subject to the

out and upside down, sideways, as a metaphysical

core of his identity as male’.* This element of men-

airplane might go’.® Or Frida Kahlo’s description of

ace is uncanny in essence in both its denial of the

surrealism as ‘the magical surprise of finding a lion

(male) sovereign gaze and its use of trompe I’oeil.

in a wardrobe, when you were “sure” of finding

Accordingly, the still life may lead to ‘a feeling of

shirts’.’ And the 1936 text of Claude Cahun on the

vertigo or shock’.? As Sigmund Freud explains in

domestic object in which she insisted that inani-

his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, the uncanny is a

mate matter was ‘wholly malleable for the irrational

psychic state in which the familiar is made strange

animal called human’ and urged the individual to

through the process of repression. Freud identifies

return to that child-like state of wonder when mat-

this experience as linked to the impossible desire

ter of all shapes and sorts had so much potential.®

and fear to return to the mother, specifically to the

This first generation of women surrealists

womb or ‘intra-uterine experience’.’ The still life

worked in an era when modern life and the modern

and the experience of the uncanny are thus both

woman were the new subject matter for high and

deemed feminine in their familiar, domestic, spatial

low culture, and when women enjoyed a certain

essence. Herein lies the still life’s subversive appeal

degree of emancipation thanks to society’s need

for the surrealist artist.

for a female workforce during the war. It was the era

Women surrealists turned to the still-life genre

of the ‘flapper’, the subject of novels (Margueritte’s

as ameans of addressing the spaces of femininity,

La Garconne of 1921), and contemporary art

not only as traditionally characterised by nature,

(Romaine Brooks’ Se/f-Portrait of 1923 and Man

domesticity and duty, but as ‘the product of a lived

Ray’s 1921 portrait of Marcel Duchamp as his

sense of social locatedness, mobility and visibility,

female dandy alter-ego Rrose Sélavy). While Mary

in the social relations of seeing and being seen’, to

Louise Roberts has argued that the cultural fascina-

borrow Griselda Pollock’s reading of the feminine.

tion with the flapper exposed social anxiety over

In contrast to the approach of many male surrealists

this new modern woman and her ‘sterile’ existence

to the genre, women artists’ still lifes might be seen

at a time of depopulation, it is against this struggle

Fig. 32

Meret Oppenheim

Eichhornchen [Squirrel], 1969

a contemporary photographic still life (of which there are few in her oeuvre), Untitled (Still Life on

Rocks) (c. 1935) (fig. 31 and pl. 26), we further appreciate her defiance of any fixed notion of womanhood. She portrays woman only through the corporeal trace — a sun-hat, vest, and a photographic portrait which is indistinct but mirrored in the dark waters below, Narcissa like — though her. cavernous

sex is perhaps alluded to by the sun-lit cracks and

hollows of large seaside rocks and the inviting water below. A portrait of a female lover, or herself,

this still life is in keeping with the artist’s political activism and lesbianism in offering a new fragmentary but independent image of woman. It speaks to an era when the Self and its pleasures were being

discovered and expressed by women artists." In contrast, Lee Miller’s Severed breasts from

radical surgery in a place setting (c. 1929) (pl. 74) is disturbingly macabre in its staging of the female body part. In this photograph Miller serves up an

between traditional and modern roles that first-

actual amputated breast from two perspectives as

generation women surrealists’ art, and their em-

if it were a chicken fillet." It is quintessentially sur-

brace of the still life, should be viewed.?

realist in its Sadism however, in keeping with the

As mentioned above, in an essay of 1936 Cahun

surrealists’ contemporary discussions on sexual

passionately called for the reinvention of the banal

desire, and her lover Man Ray’s erotic photographs

domestic object. She did so in the name of liberty,

for 1929 (a collaborative work with writers Louis

evoking food and domestic memories in a manner

Aragon and Benjamin Peéret in which, it has been

that again roots the extra-ordinary in the still-life-like

surmised, Miller herself may have had a leading

ordinary.'°Her call was in keeping with her distaste

role in his four explicit close-ups of sexual acts).

for the biological, maternal, entrapment of woman,

In seeming to pose woman as fine chinaware,

as expressed in her autobiographical essay Disavowals:

Miller calls attention to the tension between

or Cancelled Confessions: ‘This is the role of women,

woman as sexual object and sexual subject and so,

the only one that really matters to them: to inspire

perhaps, to her various roles as fashion model,

breast worship in the newcomer, whoever he is:

muse and artist. What Roland Penrose described

black or white, ill-formed or deformed, made of

as Miller’s ‘eye for a surrealist mixture of humour

ice, of fire or cinders’."" When considered alongside

and horror’, is evident here and lends insight

into her exploration of sexual dynamics at this

the need to go beyond Freud’s phallocentricism.

time."

Oppenheim’s Object exits the quintessential female

In the art of Meret Oppenheim we find a com-

space of the parlour and instead reflect the new

parable rejection of fixed notions of femininity

café spaces and correspondent lifestyles of the

as passive object of desire. She too subverts the

modern woman. Indeed, it was whilst enjoying a

domestic ideal through a radical staging of the

coffee with Dora Maar and her then lover Pablo

domestic still-life object. In stark contrast to her

Picasso that Oppenheim’s idea for this object was

gouache Still Life of 1934, which delicately portrays

born. Maar admired Oppenheim’s self-designed fur-

a floral plate with banana, lemon and plum,

covered bracelet, leading Oppenheim to declare

Oppenheim’s Object (Breakfast in Fur) (fig. 9) of

that she could fashion any object so and finding

1936 wreaked havoc on the genre and the male

inspiration for the next object of her choice when,

gaze. She stages a slice of domestic life and the

in response to the offer of more coffee, she instead

banal objects of an afternoon cup of tea — a mass-

asked the waiter for a little more ‘fur’ in her cup.'®

produced, department store purchased, china tea-

Maar’s role in this exchange adds to the sense of

cup, saucer and spoon — but transforms them into

female camaraderie over erotic symbolism, enjoy-

a monstrous gazelle-fur-covered fetish. The cup

ing fur’s Freudian potential but also its literary

metamorphoses into an empathically feminine

association with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s

and three-dimensional variation on the nineteenth-

erotic novel about female domination and male

century parlour game so loved by the surrealists,

masochism, Venus in Furs (1869).'? Oppenheim’s

the cadavre exquis [exquisite corpse], which

monstrous, fur-covered teacup, saucer and spoon

exploited the potential of bizarre juxtaposition to

not only allude to Freud’s fetish but his specific

make the banal monstrous, reflected in the surreal-

association of the texture of fur and velvet with the

ists’ contemporary fascination with metamorphosis,

dark but alluring maternal sex.?°

not least in their journal Minotaure (1933-39).'°

In Souvenir of Breakfast in Fur (1970) (pl. 91),

The cup becomes a vagina-like receptacle in its

Oppenheim reflects on the significance that 1936

concave form whilst simultaneously suggesting the

work had for her career, perhaps with a certain sense

maternal ‘vessel’ (i.e. the cup as nourishing breast).

of regret as the cup, saucer and spoon now appear

Breton’s essay of 1936 The Crisis of the Object

as a flat, blackened, still-life decoration on a kitsch

called on artists ‘to manufacture and circulate

china plate. If the 1936 cup and saucer alluded to

objects seen in dreams, however bizarre their forms

the female breast and/or sex, then this 1970 pastiche

might take’ and depreciate ‘those objects of often

offers only a weak trace of that earlier eroticism,

dubiously accepted usefulness which clutter up the

reducing the once excitedly three-dimensional to a

so-called real world’.!”

listless two-dimensional blot. It may speak to

Oppenheim’s Object shares Breton’s vision

her continued self-consciousness as a woman artist

but goes further in its recognition of the object’s

working in a feminine genre. Certainly in 1939, three

erotic potential. As with Cahun, her art suggests

years after she produced her fur-covered still life, she

Fig. 33 Frida Kahlo Naturaleza muerta con sandias

[Still Life with Watermelons], 1953

(glass, alcohol) with fur (suggestive of a moustache or the body hair of a male object of desire) she again makes a very conscious rather than chance

statement on erotic desire. These interpretations of the still life defy male psychoanalytic myopia which posits desire as intrinsically phallic and woman’s sex

as ‘lack’. Where these works present a peculiarly surrealist lexicon of desire in their approach to the still

life, other women artists focused on the theme of vanitas. Of particular importance to seventeenthcentury Dutch still-life painting, vanitas denotes a

type of still-life painting concerned with earthly existence often symbolised by articles of food and drink, the transience of life and death, often alluded

admitted to feeling ‘as if millennia of discrimination

to in flowers, half empty glasses, or candles, and

against women were resting on my shoulders, as if

resurrection, often symbolised with wheat, laurel

embodied in my feelings of inferiority’ .*!

and ivy.*? Typically including human remains

lf Oppenheim felt her oeuvre was overshad-

(memento mori), vanitas painting was moralistic in

owed by her 1936 still-life object, she did not allow

its allegorical use of perishable objects. The paint-

it to destroy her original approach to the still life as

ings of Frida Kahlo bring the vanitas tradition into

cadavre exquis in her later career. Though increas-

the modern era.

ingly drawn towards a more realistic style of draw-

Kahlo contracted polio at the age of six and was

ing and painting, as well as design and restoration,

in a serious tram accident at the age of eighteen

her later still-life works still remain true to that pre-

resulting in horrendous injuries (a broken collar-

cocious young woman who turned the housewife’s

bone, ribs and pelvis and a shattered uterus which

object into a fetish. Produced at the age of sixty,

was pierced by an iron handrail). Dogged by pain

her object Squirrel (1969), in collaboration with

and trauma all her life, she began to paint from

Roberto Lupo) (fig. 32 and pl. 88) continued her

her invalid bed and continued to do so throughout

subversive approach to the cadavre exquis game: a

some thirty-five operations until her death on

glass of what seems to be foamy beer proudly bears

13 July 1954 at the age of forty-seven. Kahlo’s art

the black bushy tail of a squirrel as handle. Involving

was thus as therapeutic as it was surreal. As Kahlo

a vessel, liquid, foam, and hair, this object brings

herself always maintained: ‘I paint my own reality.

aspects of taste and touch together in a sharp but

The only thing | know is that | paint because | need

humorous fashioning of the everyday. Through the

to, and | paint whatever passes through my head

juxtaposition of common elements of the still life

without any other consideration’ .“?

Fig. 34

Juan Sanchez Cotan Still Life with

Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber,

c. 1600. Oil on

canvas, 69x 84.5

cm.

San Diego Museum of Art, Gift of Anne R. and Amy Putnam.

Every detail of Kahlo’s paintings pulsates with this

personal and often painful life journey. This is especially true of her calm portraits of fruit and flowers. As her biographer Hayden Herrera writes, Kahlo ‘would probe the

insides of fruits and flowers, the

organs hidden beneath wounded flesh, and the feelings hidden

beneath stoic features’.** In this respect

they are somewhat reminiscent of the seventeenth-

century bodegones of the Carthusian friar Juan Sanchez Cotan and Francisco de Zurburan. In Cotan’s

Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber

(c. 1600) (fig. 34) and Zurbaran’s Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633), geometric settings and arrangements lent a monumentality and fantastic mysticism

to paintings of common fruit and vegetables. Kahlo’s still lifes have a similar existential dimension to them:

the arrangement of objects in her still-life paintings 3

brings them into the space of the viewer whilst still f

depicting what she described in her diary as ‘the

Still Life (1 Belong to Samuel Fastlicht) (pl. 56) of

honest expression of my own self’.2°

1951, painted for her dentist Fastlicht, the pre-

Her still-life paintings draw the viewer into an

Hispanic clay dog from Colima (known as itzcuintli

emphatically Mexican frame, too. Still Life with

in Nahuatl) has a privileged position in the compo-

Parrot and Flag (1951) (p!. 55), portrays local

sition, as do two flags, one of which displays her

tropical fruit — the mamey sapote, pitahaya and

Signature, place and date, a feature we often see in

cherimoya— some open and peeled to emphasise

seventeenth-century Dutch art. The robustness of

their succulence. One mamey Is pierced with a

the fruit speaks to the robustness of a nation and

Mexican flag minus its eagle, its absence empha-

yet the tear-like juice which drips from the melon’s

sised by the presence of the parrot who sits on the

pierced flesh and the prominence of the clay dog

full mamey above. For Kahlo, the parrot was a sym-

Speak to Kahlo’s personal life and failing health too:

bol of love and of her Aztec heritage (the Aztecs

it was the Aztec belief that the faithful dog accom-

believed it was supernatural as it could talk), and it

panied its master’s soul through the underworld

appeared in earlier self-portraits including Me and

until it reached its final resting place. This symbol-

My Parrots (1941) and Self Portrait with Bonito

ism explains the solemn tone of the work and is

(1941). Other still lifes emphasise Mexico’s Aztec

augmented through technique and the dramatic

heritage not only through Kahlo’s selection of fruit

use of a flat dark background. Similarly, Still Life

but in her selection of Pre-Columbian objects. In

ith Watermelons

(1953) (fig. 33 and pl. 58)

is much more than its simple title at first suggests.

fruits by her contemporary Rufino Tamayo from the

It has no visible female form but alludes to corpo-

1930s — Kahlo’s still-life paintings map her per-

real iconography and the demise of the body and

sonal, spiritual reflection on life and death.?’

flesh in its rough and smooth fruit skins which are

In the aftermath of World War Il and up to

exaggerated through impasto. The palette reminds

the events of

us of Kahlo’s symbolic use of colour, from the flesh

3} internationally with new groups forming in Japan,

May 1968, surrealism expanded

red of the melons to the shades of greenish yellow

Argentina and Canada. Amongst the younger

whose poetic symbolism she explained in 1950 as

artists to pursue surrealism was Mimi Parent who

‘more madness and mystery. All

ghosts wear

had been exposed to surrealist art and texts as

clothes of this colour, or at least

underwear’.°

an art student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de

Reworking still lifes from earlier eras in Mexican art

Montreal. Parent saw surrealism as a radical artistic

— most notably those of mid nineteenth-century

voice which went against the grain of her conser-

Agustin Arrieta and the still-life studies of tropical

vative upbringing and schooling. Having moved to

Fig. 35

Mimi Parent, J’habiteau choc

e in Shock],

1955. Musée

»s Beaux-arts du Québec.

National

Fig. 36 Hans Bellmer, Untitled, 1958 (printed

1983). Gelatin silver print (printed by Roger Vulliez), 16.2 x16.2 cm. Ubu Gallery, New York.

Paris with her husband Jean Benoit in 1947, she

joined the surrealists for their 1959 international exhibition at the Galerie Daniel Cordier which was

devoted to the theme of Eros.*8 Parent designed a fetish room for the exhibition, a black velvet-lined

crypt for small boxed objects, making public her

obsession with the still life as relic. Four years earlier she had created a miniature boxed reliquary,

/ Live in Shock (1955)

(fig. 35), which was both

nightmarish and erotic in tone. The object con-

sisted of multiple openings, each housing objects which were loaded in symbolism: white doves, a disembodied eye, a pierced heart, an entangled pearl, a female figurine dissolving into a clock, her high-heeled legs frantically reaching out of the picture plane. The work was poetic too, alluding to

Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem Palaisin his collec-

Woman’s power to castrate, as well as to seduce,

tion Alcools.*? There was perhaps a certain nostal-

are thus evoked.

gia for pre-war surrealism in her creation of reli-

Parent’s exploitation of the tactile as well as the

quaries for the found object discovered by chance

erotic potential of everyday objects finds a continu-

at a Parisian flea market, in keeping with the surre-

ity in the art of Josette Exandier, a French woman

alism of Breton’s novel Nadja (1928). Parent always

who joined the surrealist circle in Paris in the 1970s.

imbued these discarded objects with a new poetic

Exandier also used natural materials (coral, leather,

resonance, alluding to childhood, nostalgia, fairy

found animal skulls, bones and shells), as well as

tales, and the game of love. Her boxed still lifes

discarded kitsch objects, in her boxed tableaux.

draw the viewer into a chimerical — and by exten-

In Divination (1990) (pl. 39), Exandier staged glass

sion feminine (imaginary, unreal) — world. As

eyes, a doll’s hands, and a little white clay animal

Annie Le Brun has observed, while the object in

as if collaging the details of a child’s nightmare,

Parent’s work is found, she always subsequently

or the blurry traces of a memory. In her boxed

‘finds’ a new metaphysical meaning for it.2° Parent

collage The Caress (1999), a white leather glove

introduces a female voice on the Sadean aspect of

caresses a stump of phallic wood which blossoms

surrealism too, continuing this defiance of tradi-

into a flower at the top. Exandier imbues the

tional mind-body dualism. In Mistress (pl. 95)

rejected, the lost and the pathetic with a new

of 1996 she employs female hair not to evoke

lyricism and purpose. What once seemed lifeless

sensuality, as it typically does in the Western art

metamorphoses into humble but determined

canon, but to braid it into a dominatrix’s whip.?!

expressions of vitality.

Finally, if Exandier’s art recalls that of Parent,

staged in uncanny domestic interiors. It also speaks

then Kahlo’s politicised conflation of the female

to Bellmer’s sado-masochistic photographs of

body with the vanitas tradition finds its heir in

his lovers Nora Mitrani and Unica Zurn (fig. 36),

Francesca Woodman’s still life From the three kinds

in which these women artists’ bodies are contorted

of melon in four kinds of light series (1975-78

to pursue the libidinous boundaries of form and

(fig. 37 and pl. 129). In juxtaposing bare breast

art simultaneously through the camera lens.?* And

and open melon and postcard of a painted melon,

to Marcel Marién’s De Sade a Lenin (1945), a black-

Woodman also alludes to vanitas symbolism, nota-

and-white photograph of a young faceless bare-

bly the transience of youth and beauty. As with

breasted female who holds a knife which she uses

Kahlo, Woodman’s art might be seen to speak to

to cut into a loaf of bread. As the knife’s tip is omi-

fertility as well as fragility. Three kinds of melon

nously close to one breast, the image visually rein-

may also be viewed as a critique of male surrealists’

forces the theme of sexual desire/hunger despite its

framing of woman, defying her role as mute muse

political title. Yet Woodman’s image, at once beau-

just as Cahun, Oppenheim, Kahlo and others did.

tiful and disturbing, also return us to the female

This photograph recalls Hans Bellmer’s photographs

voice and its uncanny, double-edged powers. It

of the Poupée, both his first papier-mache doll and

shares the spirit of poet Joyce Mansour, who once

second ball-jointed doll (1934-35), especially those

wrote: ‘I feel like a mango/| have a horror of men who don’t know how to eat/Without dispensing

their wisdom with quick saliva . . .’.?? A discarded sun-hat, a fur covered teacup,

tresses of hair, an abandoned white glove, water-

melons, and a mango: however banal the objects selected by women surrealists, they are composed, adapted, or deconstructed in such a way as to draw

out the uncanny potential of the everyday made strange. Their still lifes, whether explored in the object, painting, or photograph, invariably allude

to the female body and its attendant roles and life stages — from lover to mother to woman on her

death bed. The tradition of the still life and of the feminine ideal are overthrown in the process and the

maternal becomes menacing, the muse becomes

dominatrix, the timeless becomes emphatically modern. Even death announces new life. In their

privileged position as woman and woman artist, these artists employed the still life as metaphor for Fig.37

Francesca Woodman

From the three kinds of melon in four kinds of light series, 1975-78

the status of woman. Their adventurous spirits and absolute deviation from cultural and social orthodoxy defied any notion of the eternal feminine as passive, maternal or mute. However disparate their

styles, all remained true to the uncanny power of the

still life, each an individualist enragé to the end.*4

phrase obtained in this manner: The exquisite — corpse — shall drink — the young — wine.’ André Breton, ‘The Exquisite Corpse,

its Exaltation’ in Breton (1972), 288-90, 289. André Breton, ‘Crisis of the Object’ (1936) in Breton (1972),

275-80, 277. Josef Helfenstein also notes the importance of the café as ‘an

ideal place for “conspiracy” and for collective working’, in his essay ‘Against the Intolerability of Fame: Meret Oppenheim and Surrealism’, in Burckhardt and Curiger (1996), 23-33, 30.

Of course Breton’s title more obviously alludes to Edouard Manet’s controversial painting Déjeuner sur l’herbe of 1863.

See Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, in Freud (1964), 153. Notes

1 Onthe modern still life see Rowell (1997). 2 Bryson (1990), 172-73. 3 Ibid., 142-43. 4 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) in The Penguin Freud

Library (1990), 339-76, 367. 5 Griselda Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ in Pollock (1988), 66. 6 Eileen Agar, ‘Am | a Surrealist?’ in Rosemont (1998), 91-93, 91.

Curiger (1989), 43. See Bergstrom (1956). Frida Kahlo, ‘| Paint my own Reality’, in Rosemont (1998), 145. Herrera (1983), 96-97. Herrera (1983), 397. Raquel Tibol, ‘Pain-Love-Liberation: Frida Kahlo’s Words’, in Dexter

and Barson (2005), 183-97, 187. Oles (1996), 20. Breton heard of Parent (and Benoit) in 1959 through his daughter

7 Frida Kahlo, ‘| Paint my own Reality’ in Rosemont (1998), 145.

Aube and her husband Yves Elléouét. The Elléouéts dined at Par-

8 Claude Cahun, ‘Beware Domestic Objects! (1936) in Rosemont

ent’s and Benoit’s apartment one evening and on seeing the art

1998) 59-61, 59. © ZFoberts (1994). 10 Claude Cahun, ‘Beware Domestic Objects!’ (1936) in Rosemont 1998), 59-60. 11 Cahun (2007), 45. 12 Anumber of essays address Cahun’s art from a lesbian perspec-

on the walls later advised Breton to visit the young couple too. The following day Breton arrived at the apartment and invited

Parent and Benoit to join the surrealists. Mimi Parent, interview with author, Paris, 18 July 2000.

29 See Missir (1999), 97-102, 102. Other authors to inspire Parent included Lewis Carroll, Alfred Jarry and Achim von Arnim.

tive. See for example, Dawn Ades, ‘Surrealism, Male-Female’

30 Le Brun (1984), n.p.

in Mundy (2001), 171-96, and Jennifer Shaw, ‘Collaborative Self-

Sil This punning continues Parent’s word play in Boite alerte, her col-

Images in Claude Cahun’s Aveux non Avenus’, in Chadwick and Latimer (2003), 155-67.

13 Miller took the amputated breast from a hospital in Paris where it had been removed in a radical mastectomy operation. Haworth-

Booth (2007), 88. 14 See Pierre (1992). 15 Penrose (1981), 128, my emphasis. 16 The cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse) was defined in the Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme as: ‘Game of folded paper which consists in having several people compose a phrase or a drawing

laborative work with Marcel Duchamp for the 1959 EROS exhibi-

tion. See Mahon (2005), 166-69. 32 See Krauss (2000) in which she presents a reading of Woodman in light of Bellmer’s art and the feminisation of the gaze. On Bellmer’s representation of the female body in his dolls and photographs of Mitrani and ZUrn, see Alyce Mahon, ‘Hans

Bellmer’s Libidinal Politics’, in Spiteri and LaCoss (2003), 246-66. 3}5) Joyce Mansour, ‘A Mango’, from Carré blanc (1965), trans. Mary

Beach in Rosemont

(1998), 323.

34 In 1970 Mimi Parent described herself as an individualist enragé,

collectively, none of the participants having any idea of the

continuing to fight despite the decline and fall of surrealism as a

nature of the preceding contribution or contributions. The now

collective. See Mimi Parent, ‘Are you a Surrealist?’ in Rosemont

classical example, which gave its name to the game, is the first

(1998), 327-29; 329.

Women

Artists,

Surrealism and Animal Representation

When | was a debutante, | often went to the zoo. ! went so often that |knew the animals better than

| knew girls of my own age. Indeed it was in order to get away from people that | found myselfat the zoo every day.

As she walked into the garden the birds flew down to her pecking at her lips.

Flying Is woman’s gesture — flying in language and making it fly.

A nimal motifs are as old as the practice of art

individual creative way. They frequently appropri-

itself, as prehistoric cave paintings, the bestiaries of

ated or subverted certain techniques, themes

illuminated medieval manuscripts or the fine fleur

and principles of mainstream (male) surrealism,

tapestries attest. Animal fables go back to Antiquity,

gleaned from André Breton’s original Parisian

and beasts continue to be represented on various

movement or other groups. Consequently, several

levels, ranging from mimetic realism to metaphor,

common tendencies characterise the three genera-

symbol, myth, totem or caricature.

tions of women artists and/or writers, who rarely

As has been demonstrated since the 1970s

worked together and were usually relegated

and 1980s,* ‘women surrealists’ constitute a slip-

to the margins of their surrealist milieu, primarily

pery category. They never defined themselves

as partners and muses. One strong common de-

as a separate school and often passed through

nominator is their partiality to animal representa-

surrealism, before finding their own related but

tion.

Fig. 38 Leonora Carrington Self-portrait, c. 1937-38

In their art and writing, these women inscribe a

myriad of beasts, birds and insects, the richest bestiary being Leonora Carrington’s. Her early selfportraits as a hybrid horse-woman, Self-portrait

(c. 1937-38) (fig. 38 and pl. 30) and Woman and Bird (c. 1937), other equine paintings and short stories, such as The House ofFear, The Debutante or The Oval Lady, from her idyllic years with Max Ernst (1937-40), when they wrote, painted and sculpted animal motifs at Saint-Martin-d’Ardeche, establish

the horse as her totem and alter-ego. In her youthful art ‘confidence swells with intense, voluptuous

power Carrington’s young girl-beasts’.° Countless creatures, real and invented, have populated

Carrington’s work ever since, particularly after she

moved to Mexico in 1942, and combined Mayan myths with her Celtic heritage, strong interest in

Leonora Carrington, Valentine Hugo, Marianne van

alchemy and knowledge of the occult: ‘in every-

Hirtum and Bona. Dorothea Tanning prefers Tibetan

body, she says, there is an “inner bestiary”’.©

dogs and Emmy Bridgwater chose birds. With excep-

The expression ‘interwar women’s outsider-

tions, such as Ernst’s totem, Loplop the Bird Superior

insider activity’,’ could apply to the women surreal-

(actually named after his son’s rocking-horse®), and

ists’ tenuous situation as artists, between their male

Picasso’s minotaurs, the strange creatures invented

artist partners’ ‘outside’ world and their own ‘inside’

by surrealist men were usually results of automatic

universe, their ambiguous status as (non-) members

techniques, such as frottage (Ernst), fumage

of the group, and their occasional descent into

(Paalen), abstract tachisme (Miro) or Freudian jokes

madness, producing astonishing outsider texts and

(Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia), whereas the women

images (Carrington’s Down Below of 1943; Unica

tended towards an inner identification with bestial

Ziuirn’s drawings, paintings and the novel Der Mann

metamorphoses, often inspired by myths or deities

im Jasmin of 1970; Claude Cahun’s confessions,

such as the Celtic White Goddess? or the Mayan

Disavowals: or Cancelled Confessions of 1930, and

Coatlicue, who could change shapes at will. The

ambiguous photographic self-portraits). Animals fre-

women represented favourite animal companions in

quently reflect these women’s identity quest and

self-portraits (Kahlo’s monkeys, parrots and hairless

imaginary escape into a different world, where they

Mexican dogs; Cahun’s cats) or photographed other

need not be dominated. Cats appealed to Remedios

women artists with their pets (Maar’s 1936 picture

Varo, Alice Rahon, Léonor Fini, Gisele Prassinos,

of Fini with a large black cat; Lola Alvarez Bravo’s

Fig. 39 Leonor Fini

Petit Sphinx hermite {Little Hermit Sphinx], 1948

well as familiar animals such as cats, dogs or horses.

Lee Miller shot an unusual domestic scene in 1952 with her young son Tony Penrose watching Valentine

Penrose charm a snake (pl. 82); and mythical snakes

duly figure in Colquhoun’s Gorgon (1946) (pl. 36).

Other pictures favour the Unheimliche:" synthetic or imaginary beasts such as Meret Oppenheim’s

Squirrel (1969) (pl. 88), combining a squirrel’s tai with a beer mug, or Dora Maar’s untitled object

(1934) (pl. 62), a human hand emerging from a seashell; trompe-loeil effects occur in Toyen’s work or Jane Graverol’s Magrittian The Holy Spirit (1965)

(pl. 49), where a bird in flight replaces a woman’s sex. Lee Miller subverts the traditional sphinx in Se/f-

portrait with Sphinxes (1940) (pl. 72) by showing ive eyes behind stone masks; in Little Hermit Sphinx 1948) (fig. 39 and pl. 44), Fini proposes a carnivorous child sphinx; and in The Schoolof Vanity 1967) (pl. 47), Graverol presents a mechanical toy sphinx. Insects proliferate, especially giant butterlies, symbolising escape in Valentine Penrose’s col-

ages (see The End of the War [1934-42] [pl. 96]); or as ghostly apparitions in Remedios Varo’s Insomnia

portraits of Frida Kahlo with a variety of animals);

(1947) (pl. 123). The surrealist fascination with

little magical lemurs appear as alter-egos, usually

underwater fauna surfaces in Josette Exandier’s

in self-portraits, by Carrington, Tanning, Valentine

Divination (1990) (pl. 39), a small three-dimensional

Hugo and Mimi Parent. Some animal images have

box staging a doll’s eyes, hands and other body

erotic connotations: Tanning’s girls embracing giant

parts emerging from a cluster of rockbound barna-

dogs (Tableau vivant, and The Blue Waltz of 1954);

cles; fish appear ‘out of water’ in Leonor Fini’s

Carrington’s lusty tale As They Rode along the Edge”

The Parasol (1947) (pl. 43) and Unica ZUrn’s

or Virginia Tentindo’s playfully sexual sculptures.

Woman, Fish and Bird (1961); as do shells and sea

Women surrealists’ paintings, collages and

creatures in Kahlo’s Diego and Frida 1929 -1944 (I)

photographs include mythical creatures, hybrids or

(1944) (pl. 54); and a displaced starfish becomes

zoomorphic shapes (organic-looking rocks like Ithell

an ornament in Miller's photograph of Eileen Agar

Colquhoun’s Scyl/a [1938] [pl. 33], or Eileen Agar’s

posing with her sculpture Golden Tooth (1937)

Rocks at Ploumanach, Brittany [1936] [pl.7]), as

(pl. 84).

Fig.40

Rachel Baes

La Polka |The Polka], 1946

The anonymous photograph of Sheila Legge as the Surrealist Phantom in Trafalgar Square, for the Inter-

national Surrealist Exhibition (1936) (pl. 119), towering over a flock of pigeons, personifies the profusion

of bird images produced by women surrealists. Like angels or butterflies, birds can connote a desire to escape. Bird cages, often represented by Magritte and other surrealist men, acquire a political irony in works by certain women: in The Polka (1946) (fig. 40 and pl. 15), Rachel Baes painted an empty,

trompe-l’oeil wicker cage, shaped like a woman, and Jane Graverol’s bird becomes a feminine angel figure made of the same metal as her cage in

The Celestial Prison (1963) (pl. 48), probably an allegory of woman in surrealism, adulated for her beauty but incarcerated. The erotically charged

British slang word bird and its American equivalent chick, meaning woman, often inscribe a Freudian

Witz into bird images by anglophone female artists. Metonymic feathers are scattered about the

women’s corpus, just as their bodies were fed into their partners’ creations. A photo by Claude Cahun

(Feathers, bird, sword and drape, c. 1936) (pl. 28) denounces the killing of birds by showing one at the tip of a sword, behind a pile of feathers. Similarly, an

(fig. 41 and pl. 101), a composition combining ani-

untitled assemblage by Elisa Breton transforms an

mate creatures (bird and butterflies) and inanimate

Amerindian protective charm into a cruel hunting

objects (leather strap and armoured glove).

trophy, by replacing the feathers around the ring

Remedios Varo portrayed herself as a creative wise

with small dead birds, and the central animal carv-

owl and Edith Rimmington draped a fabric effigy

ing with a real mink head (pl. 18). Bird types range

of an owl around a Greek statue like a new identity,

from an endearing miniature green parrot, settled

in Sisters of Anarchy (1940) (pl. 102).

among fleshy fruits, in Kahlo’s Still Life with Parrot

The hybrid black-and-white photograph

and Flag (1951) (pl. 55), to the threatening vulture

Ladybird (1936) (pl. 8) by Eileen Agar, with gouache

in Edith Rimmington’s Relative Strength (1950)

and ink on paper, based on a snapshot of Agar by

Fig.41

Edith Rimmington

Relative Strength, 1950

woman’s body is accordingly dotted with round shapes. She too looks caught in a net, as might befall a bird, but seems able to dance her way out, as asmall insect could. This light, seductive picture,

in which the bird remains metaphorical, has a magical, gossamer-like quality, expressing a humorous

tribute to pleasure and feminine beauty. In Cock Rock (The Native) (1939) (pl. 75), by

Lee Miller, ‘words make love’ as the playful title anchors the image. Phonologically, the two almost

identical words rhyme; syntactically, the first noun adjectivally qualifies the second and semantically,

the double meaning of ‘cock’ (rooster or penis) invites several interpretations of the photograph and points to other binaries, such as animate/ inanimate, animal/mineral or public/intimate. Miller

took the picture in Egypt, near Siwa, shortly before eaving Aziz Eloui Bey for Roland Penrose, a few

months before World War II broke out. Feeling trapped in Egypt, Miller found an inner freedom in photographing the desert landscapes. Carolyn

Burke reads ‘a latent sexual energy’" into Miller’s her husband Joseph Bard," a ‘photo of herself. . .

Egyptian work at a time when, according to her

[that] can be read as a commentary on her tech-

letters, she longed for her absent lover. Antony

nique’,"? provides a delightful example of her

Penrose underscores the picture’s erotic connota-

humour. The masked, naked subject is dancing,

tion: ‘a wind-eroded rock rears up as a ragged phal-

wrapped in transparent fabric and ink-drawn shapes

lus’,"©whereas Mark Hayworth-Booth emphasises

(some phallic), composing a schematised stellar

the other, bird-related meaning of cock: ‘In 1939,

configuration, in which poetic objects (stars, flowers

she photographed The Native, or Cock Rock as she

and circles) are caught as in a net. The bouquet-like

called it, in the Western Desert, identifying the

form of the picture, juxtaposed with the title puns,

huge stone as a mythic bird like one of Picasso’s

sets off the poetic spark of a surrealist image. The

white sculptures’.'” Here, like Agar, Miller offers a

title Ladybird suggests a joke, by juxtaposing the

witty and cultural interpretation of nature.

respectful term /ady with the slang word bird, both

In a post-war bird painting by Edith Rimmington,

meaning woman. More lyrically, it evokes a pretty,

The Oneiroscopist (1947) (fig. 42 and pl. 100),

red, black-spotted, supposedly lucky beetle, and the

humour tends towards caricature. This portrait

of an uncanny, androgyno us bird-person, seen

ture’s situation, on a boarded deck with a ladder

sitting on a crate in profile like a human, wearing

visible behind it (leading where ?), between the

a loose black robe, is ‘one of the icons of British

Magrittian background of clouds around a grey

surrealism’.'® Its complex title means ‘an observer »

of dreams’.

19

The creature’s thick beak ar d

large

space (sea or sky) and Dali’s discarded disguise, could be a caricature of British surrealism as it per-

size evoke a marabou, yet one visible foot resembles

ceived itself in 1947, islanded and in a different

a bony eagle’s talon, while ‘the other wears a diver’s

boat from the main movement. The figure, an

heavy shoe’;7° a big human hand, emerging from

astonishing blend of bird, old woman and blind seer,

the left sleeve, rests on its knee. The diving equip-

confirms that impression.

ment on the ground beside the bird explains

Whitney Chadwick’s detected ‘reference to Dall’s famous London appearance dressed in a diving

suit’.*! The neckline of the figure’s outfit, which Chadwick now calls a ‘diving suit’, now a ‘shapeless cloak’ seems to match the helmet. Such contradic-

tions become acceptable in the realm of dreams,

into which ‘the birdlike creature [is] preparing for

its descent’.** Remy descr ibes the image as a living paradox: ‘Being an oneiroscopist, [. . .] the bird

cannot but plunge into th e water; that is its function. But it won't, because it can't! Its body is arrested, suspended between the possible and

the impossible’.*? Remy a so notes that the helmet could never cover the bea k. Furthermore, the bird

looks blind and is gazing |nwards. It recalls an English nonsense beast, imagined by Lewis Carroll or

Edward Lear, making subt e fun of bird-watching, a British national pastime, with a bird-like dream-

watcher, watching him/herself and observed by a puzzled viewer. f male artists see themselves as bird/woman-watchers, female artists tend to look inward. This painting, like many by women surrealists, favours the colours of alchemy: black, white

and gold, but in tarnished tones, matching the

figure’s unglamorous app earance and enhancing the artist’s self-derisive Br itish humour. The creaFig.42

Edith Rimmington

The Oneiroscopist, 1947

The Greek bird myth of Leda and the Swan has

inspired several avant-garde women artists, whose

lightly tinted with greenish yellow, has a bud on a long stem for a head and neck, two leaves for arms,

feminine focalisation alters the traditional story.

a tiny waist continuing the stalk and a curved mid-

Narrative variations in ancient literature of Leda’s

dle attached to her thighs on one side, and to a

rape or seduction by Zeus in the shape of a swan

drooping flower on the other, evoking a newborn

mainly relate to the resulting children, always

baby and its umbilical cord. Behind this configura-

including Helen of Sparta, the cause of the Trojan

tion, the swan’s elongated black shadow, while

War.*4 Modern artists and writers have followed

encompassing the forlorn plant, is spiralling off and

their own fantasies concerning the strange cou-

abandoning it, swirling into a road or liquefied into

pling between woman and swan. The Irish poet

a river. Suffused in blue, the background suggests

W. B. Yeats imagines a brutal violation:

an aquatic landscape with reeds, under a melancholy, nocturnal sky, illuminated by a white moon.

How can those terrified fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening

thighs? °°

These elements enhance the artist’s subversion

of a traditional myth through mutation and the woman’s more grotesque than beautiful aspect,

while ironically respecting the bird’s multicultural The poet-painter Emmy Bridgwater created a Leda

symbolism.?? In Greek mythology, a swan represents

and the Swan collage (c. 1950) (pl. 20), during her

male beauty, light and fertility; in Celtic lore, it

most productive years (1940s and early 1950s),

embodies desire, love and death; in alchemy, it

when she was obsessed with the body, birth, death,

emblematises elusive, liquid, silvery-white mercury.

disintegration and birds: ‘Bridgwater’s birds are

Yet here, the viewer is ambiguously confronted

allegorical agents of the original fracture, to be re-

either with a black swan, bearer of different, nega-

enacted over and over again, of the walls of author-

tive symbols or with a white swan’s black shadow.

ity, whether sexual, social or political’.2° She made

In any case, the bird/god emanates male physical

extensive use of metamorphosis and ‘space Is

dominance, as in Ithell Colquhoun’s vision of ‘a bird

where nothing really holds and everything circu-

in shape like a swan, but so huge that it might have

lates, having been deprived of any origin’.*” In this

been an albatross’.°

piece, woman and swan are undergoing a post-

The expatriate French-Canadian Mimi Parent

coital transformation, she turning into an earth-

composed her Leda and the Swan (1997) (pl. 94),

bound flowering plant and he dissolving into the

in three-dimensional form. Parent’s boxes are

landscape, while fleeing through air and water.

miniature theatres and here she stages a mutual

The missing element, fire, has been extinguished by

embrace. While Bridgwater’s erotic effect emerges

consummation. Leda sits sideways her legs folded

from the permutation of shapes and textures,

under her thighs?8 like a mermaid, in a pool of black

Parent’s assemblage emulates more traditional rep-

ink, also an extension of the swan’s shadow (a pun

resentations of mythical animal seduction, with

on Swan Lake perhaps). The strange femme-fleur,

Leda succumbing to her own desire for the swan’s

Fig.43

Valentine Penrose

Les Fées | {The Fairies |], 1934-42

downy body and phallic neck.?' This image, in its

visible through two identical arched background

aesthetic, oneiric eroticism, recalls Baudelaire.

windows. An effect of correspondences (Baudelaire)

Unlike Bridgwater’s spiralling movements, Parent’s

or communicating vessels (Breton) ensues between

scene remains static. The kissing couple, the swan’s

outside and inside, art and reality. Everything |

open wings sheltering Leda, are standing in the

tinted with oneiric pinks and blues: inside, Leda’s

Wn

foreground, their necks entwined. Seen from

body and the swan’s wings; outside, various Greek-

behind, her pale, naked body looks marmoreal.

style stone edifices. At the couple’s feet, soft silky

Baudelaire’s Beauty compares herself to un réve de

cushions take on brighter hues and a stole around

pierre (a dream of stone)?¢ and Parent’s scene radi-

Leda’s legs reflects the blue sky. Fiery orange

ates ordre et beauté/Luxe, calme et volupté.*? Zeus

touches, the rainbow’s outer stripe, the window

(the swan) remains the all-powerful magician and

frames, Leda’s high-heeled shoe, her red hair and

perpetrator of a perfect erotic encounter. His sym-

the bird’s predatory beak, transgress and eroticize

metrical décor is lit up and coloured by a rainbow,

the muted dream colours. The rainbow effect

evokes Baudelaire’s La Chambre double, an imagi-

creates a ‘passage’ effect with the greyness of

nary transformation of a sordid garret into a

the swan, her own flesh and various shadows.

Chambre paradisiaque.** The realistic swan, an

The obscurity simultaneously embodies each

outdoor bird, plays the human lover inside, while

figure’s element, water for the swan, dance

conversely, a second one swims in a pond outside,

floor for the woman, dissociating them spatially.

among reeds and water lilies, in an Art Nouveau

The woman’s Ernst-like decapitation makes identifi-

frieze configuration. In Valentine Penrose’s collage

cation with Woodman herself uncertain, however

The Fairies

1(1934-42) (fig. 43 and pl. 99), another

likely. Her right hand, emerging from the darkness,

swan similarly evokes a boat-shaped Art Nouveau

cups the bird’s head in a caress, turning him into

ornament. The viewer sees neither Leda’s face nor

an S-shaped extension of her body — S for Swan,

the swan’s body. The couple’s osmotic attitude

Serpent... Sex. Proportions look realistic as the

could represent the moment of orgasm, foreplay,

aquatic fowl, more fleshy than feathery, resolutely

or a final embrace after the fact; the swan is holding

swims towards the girl’s sexual centre. The heavy,

a heavy necklace around Leda’s neck in his beak,

erotic desire emanating from this black-and-

he could be removing it, offering it or using it as a

white print and the swan’s saxophone neck evoke

chain. These ambiguities remain part of the stat-

the heat of the American South, traditional jazz

uette the couple is locked into for ever, like the

and the wailing blues of racial, social and sexual

figures on Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn or Leonora

oppression. Here the human female and anthropo-

Carrington, in a curious tribute paid to her by

morphic male bird’s ‘mating dance’ blurs their

Octavio Paz: *...awhite swan, drowned in its own

difference on a surreal level, while emphasising

whiteness’ .?°

Woodman’s ‘strategies of disjunction and alien-

‘| sure think about Leda and the swan a lot’,

ation’?’ versus unbearable reality. As Townsend

wrote Francesca Woodman.?° Her photograph

points out: ‘It is not an accident that so many of her

Untitled (1975-78) (pl. 130) refers to and modern-

subjects are drawn from classical mythology and

izes the myth. Though aesthetically clear, smooth

its legends of divine transformation [. . .] the body

and harmonious, the image’s content proves char-

can always be magically transformed into some-

acteristically enigmatic and disturbing. Against

thing else’.?®

a uniformly black backdrop, two grey and white

Women surrealists’ ornithological or angelical

figures, a young woman and a swan, are dancing

imagery illustrates, sometimes proleptically, the

face to face. The girl’s head and feet have under-

concept of vol (French for flightor theft), coined by

gone a Procrustean crop; her chin and neck remain

Cixous: ‘What woman hasn’t flown/stolen?’.?? Many

visible. Her body follows a slow dance rhythm, as

acquired artistic skills and sexual freedom from the

her left arm and leg, slightly slung back, gently

surrealist group(s), before migrating to personal

propel it towards her partner; her sleeveless, slinky

territories. Finally, this important exhibition humor-

white sheath (ball gown or nightdress) brightly

ously inscribes a new, secular Conference of the

contrasts with the black night behind them and

Birds.*° In the original allegorical Persian poem, the

birds of the world, representing all different human types, undertake a pilgrimage in search of a king;

Penrose (1985), 81. Haworth-Booth (2007), 132.

turns out to be for truth and a purified self.

Remy (1999), 296. Ibid. Ibid. Chadwick (1985), 156. Ibid. Remy (1999), 296.

Notes

See Graves (2000), 196-97; Dictionnaire de Mythologie grecque

many die on the way and the thirty survivors’ quest

1 Carrington (1989), 44.

Bridgwater (1997), 46.

Cixous (1986), 316. (1977); Chadwick (1985), 91-92; La Femme et le surréalisme (1987); Colvile (1999); Conley (1996). Warner (1991), 19. Warner (1989), 1. See also Colvile (1991). Gambrell (1997), 41. Ernst (1986), 344.

aes) ips) (GS) Obliques

18h) Robert fepy Hf) leah (Coy

Graves’ The White Goddess made a lasting impression

on Leonora Carrington, from its first publication in 1948. 10 Written in 1937-40, in French, first published as ‘Quand ils pas-

11

12 13 14 15

et romaine (2003), 374. Yeats (1990), 127. Remy (1999), 296. Ibid. It has interestingly been suggested to me that the thighs could be fingers from a hand holding the flower.

See Chevalier and Gheerbrandt (1982), 332-34. Colquhoun (2003), 44. See, for example, School of Leonardo, Leda and the Swan,

c. 1510, Uffizi, Florence; in Impelluso (2004), 104. Baudelaire (1996), 52, ‘La Beauté’. Baudelaire (1996), 89, ‘LInvitation au voyage’.

saient’, in Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron’s Preface to Carrington

Baudelaire (1973), 28-30.

(1986); and then in English, translated by Kathrine Talbot, in

Quoted in Le Brun (2008), 53. My translation.

Carrington (1988), 3-18. Freud (1958; original 1919). Eileen Agar (1899-1991) (1999), 77. Remy (1999), 144. Breton (1974), 141. Burke (2005), 150.

Townsend (2006), ‘Journal Extracts’ from Notebook #6(n.d.),

n.p. Townsend (2007), 34.

Townsend (2007), 5. Cixous (1986), 316. Attar (2001).

‘Neither Wings nor Stones’: the Psychological Realism

of Czech Women Surrealists

i

work of the Czech surrealist artists displayed

programme called Poetism, and despite acknowl-

in this exhibition, Toyen, Emila Medkova and Eva

edging a certain sympathy with surrealism, re-

Svankmajerova, represents three generations of the

mained critical of the movement until the early

Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group. Established in

1930s. The extraordinary enthusiasm with which

1934, this group quickly provided a vital dynamic to

the poet Nezval embraced surrealism helped to

the internationalisation of surrealism in the 1930s,

establish a group that is still very active today,

and for André Breton, who first visited Prague in

despite the fact that the continuity of the group’s

1935, the home of the Czech surrealist group re-

activities was disrupted by a cruel succession of

presented the old and magical heart of Europe that

military and political regimes in the Czechoslovak

Breton

Republic, beginning with the Nazi occupation of

Be

felt had innate and historical affinities with

surrealism. Although the Czechs declared their alle-

1938 and ending with the liberalisation from the

giance to Breton’s conception of surrealism, Czech

final Communist regime in 1989.

surrealism had a very particular evolution which

What we can see of this history in the work of

has lent it a distinct character. The initial strength of

Toyen, Medkova and Svankmajerova is the way in

this character was due in some ways to the highly

which the powerful lyrical drive of Czech surrealism

developed collective activity that preceded the

was balanced by an insistence upon the material

founding of the surrealist group in the Czechoslovak

and psychological reality of the everyday. The title

Republic. Prior to this development, the central

of this essay takes its cue from a series of drawings

members of the group, poet Vitézslav Nezval, theo-

Toyen made in 1948, ambivalently titled Neither

rist Karel Teige, and painters Toyen and Jindfich

Wings Nor Stones: Wings and Stones, and will discuss

Styrsky, were formative figures in the Czech avant-

the work of Toyen, Medkova and Svankmajerova in

garde group Devétsil [Nine Forces], which existed

relation to the historical shifts in the Czech surreal-

from 1920 to 1930. Devétsil had its own theoretical

ist group. It will also address how their work reflects

certain tendencies within Czech surrealism, in

Svankmajerova through the assertion that surrealist

particular the theme of anxiety, and the move away

art did not shy away from social reality, but, rather,

from the pre-war reveries upon the everyday in

presented ‘evidence that this romantic ivory tower

pursuit of a more grounded experience of the

has been abandoned and dismantled, that poetic

encounter between external and internal realities.

thought, unlike rootless orchids, did not grow in

Although a sense of the lyrical and the marvellous

a greenhouse and did not faint when confronted

is to be found in Czech surrealism, those some-

with today’s traumas’. Teige’s insistence upon the

what utopian aspects of Parisian surrealism would

power of poetic thought to absorb social reality and

become highly modified in the Czech context,

precipitate a critique of it would remain as constant

particularly after the war. Due to its experiences of

within post-war Czech surrealism as it was before

war, occupation and political oppression, the Czech

the war. The alliance of capitalism with a positivist

group, under the theoretical leadership of Karel

notion of reality, against which pre-war surrealism

Teige (1900 -1951) and his successor Vratislav

directed itself, would, after and during the war,

Effenberger (1923 -1986), developed a critical per-

no longer be seen as the major enemy of freedom

spective in which a confrontation with the disquiet-

or the imagination, but was seen to have been

ing aspects of daily reality could not be avoided.

deposed by a bureaucratic, military, and economic

Toyen, Medkova and Svankmajerova evidently con-

system that set about governing reality with an

fronted manifold reality in different ways, and yet

insidious and fearful capacity to erase imaginative

all three artists reflect the boldness of Czech surre-

and critical thinking.

alism in its pursuit to bring together subjective

After Teige’s death in 1951, Effenberger em-

and objective realities, without flinching at the

barked upon a highly conscientious redevelopment

frequently disturbing nature of either.

In his essay The Shooting Gallery (1946), the

of surrealist thought throughout his period as chief

theoretician of the Czech group from the 1950s

foreword to a publication of a series of Toyen’s

to the 1980s. In his essay Variants, Constants and

graphic work from 1939 to 1940, Teige defended

Dominants of Surrealism (1966-67), he defined

surrealism against the criticism that it evaded social

the critical role of surrealism as ‘a certain type of

realities. Underlining Czech surrealism’s allegiance

imaginative protest’’ that was capable of revealing

to the revolutionary aims of surrealism, he con-

the apparent cohesion and stability of social reality

tended such criticisms thus: ‘Opponents of surreal-

to be ‘an aggressive fiction’,* and yet he strongly

ism have accused it of turning away from objective

believed that the importance of surrealism had

reality and social conflict, of seeking illusory refuge

always come from a combination of its critical and

in an ivory tower, of being indifferent to the era’s

creative aspects. Frantisek Dryje, a member of the

appeals, and of not participating in the revolution-

current Czech group since the late 1970s, has out-

ary battle for the new world’.' Although Teige’s

lined Effenberger’s vision of surrealism as based on

study concerns Toyen’s work in particular, his argu-

both the force of its critique of the prevailing ratio-

ment could equally apply to that of Medkova and

nalist order of things and its capacity to generate

expansive modes of individually and collectively

most heightened confusions of the rational and

creative behaviour through, Dryje emphasises,

the irrational.®

uncovering what Breton called in his Manifesto

Given the frequently oppressive political environ-

of Surrealism (1924) ‘the real functioning of

ments in which Toyen,

thought’.° What Effenberger considered surreal-

were active, it is unsurprising that an air of anxiety

ism’s genuinely creative force lay in its ability to

pervades so much of

uncover the very processes of creative thinking.

on Toyen, Breton defined her work as imbued

He set about analysing this in terms of what he

with a sense of ‘dark foreboding’,? and the Czech

called the ‘surrealist phenomenology of the imagi-

art historian, Jindrich Chalupecky would later define

nation’, which aims, he wrote, ‘to make accessible

Toyen’s greatest contribution to European surreal-

the hidden relationships between unconscious-

ism as the ‘visualisation of anxiety’.'° The painting

ness and the process of becoming conscious’.®

Early Spring (1945) (fig. 44) presents a bleak, un-

The work of Toyen, Medkova and Svankmajerova

inhabited, and war-torn landscape in which endless

Medkova and Svankmajerova their work. In his 1953 essay

in many ways reflects the trajectories of Czech

rows of stone piles, resembling graves or even the

surrealism in terms of both its critical and creative

huts of concentration camps, disappear into the

elements.’ It also attests to the commitment

horizon. The absence of the human figure, which

within the Czech group to a defence of imaginative

has been replaced by the morbidly neat human-

and critical thinking, and to the constant efforts

sized piles of graves, contributes to the dismal and

to re-asses the very notion of reality in certain

uncanny atmosphere of the scene. Another Czech

periods of history when, for the Czech surrealists,

art historian, Karel Srp, has discussed this work as

reality was characterised by fear and absurdity,

one of

and when everyday reality itself presented the

close of the war. These he describes as ‘Toyen’s final

anumber of large paintings made at the

meditation’ and ‘a prophecy of the approaching

end and as a reflection on the dragging war years’." The rows of graves in Early Spring he describes as ‘an acknowledgement of nameless victims and presumed war heroes’. Toyen’s experiences during and immediately after the war were full of personal grievance and anxiety. Her long-term artistic partner, Jindfich Styrsky, died at the age of forty-two in Prague in March 1942, and from 1941 until the end of the war she hid the surrealist poet Jindfich Heisler — who was Jewish and had not registered as a‘non-Aryan’ — in her Prague apartment. In 1947,

amidst an atmosphere of fear of a communist

upheaval in Czechoslovakia, Toyen left Prague with Fig.44

Toyen

L'Avant-printemps [Early Spring], 1945 Musée national d’art moderne, Paris.

Fig.45 Mikulas Medek, /mperialist Breakfast (Emila and Flies), 1953. Tempera and oil on canvas,

110 x 80 cm. Private collection, Prague.

Heisler to live in Paris, where she would remain a

resident for the rest of her life.' From the late 1930s and throughout the war,

Toyen utilised the surrealist trope of the flat, endless horizon, reminiscent of the work of Dali or Tanguy, for example. She used this most intensely in her graphic series The Shooting Gallery (1939) and

Hide War! (1944), which feature barren landscapes strewn with disquieting juxtapositions of decaying

and partial objects. Instead of producing a sense of physical expansiveness through this distant line of the horizon, however, Toyen seems to close the

viewer into the composition, playing with the ten- fe) n

between flatness and horizontality, depth and

recession. Karel Srp observes that Toyen’s use of the horizontal

line is key to the sense of anxiety both

represented in and affected by her art: ‘Anxiety is represented by emptiness expressed in hollow

ety is caused and represented by the uncannily

shapes and wide open horizons inducing vertigo in

indistinct shapes of materialising or dematerialising

As the viewer

forms, most frequently that of a spectral female

of Early Spring, we stand on the very edge of the

figure, disappearing into or emanating from an

scene, and yet our partial view on this bleak and

indefinable organic or inorganic surface, such as

> 13

one suffering from agoraphobia’.'’

silent landscape, with its stones, large, bleached

bark or walls. This feature of Toyen’s work would be

seashells and strange wooden contraption, con-

a determining influence on Medkova’s photo-

trives to produce a sense of spatial anxiety and an

graphic compositions from the late 1950s onwards,

apparent constraint of meaning.

when her recurrent visual theme became the emer-

Toyen’s Early Spring belongs to a period of work

gence of anthropomorphic forms from the surface

which can be described as psychological landscape,

of decaying walls. This shared fascination with the

in which the atmosphere of war evoked traumatic

spectral emergence of human forms can be seen,

resonances and induced a sense of claustrophobia.

for example, in Medkova’s Eyes (1965) (pl. 70).

Over the next ten years Toyen would return to gen-

Throughout the 1950s Medkova had developed her

erating a sense of anxiety based around ambiguous

own representations of anxiety using the backdrop

£

states of matter. This was a characteristic of her

of the dilapidated streets of Prague, through which

work first developed in the late 1920s which

she produced a curious elision of landscape and

strongly informed her early surrealist period of the

still-life photography, creating cycles of closed

mid 1930s. Throughout this period, a sense of anxi-

entrances and signs which barred, rather than

Fig.46

Toyen, The Myth of Light, 1946

Oilon canvas, 160x75

cm. Moderna Museet,

Stockholm,

we can see the images Untitled (Angel)

(pl. 69),

(1948)

Cap with Barometer (1949) (pl. 71), and

Cascade of Hair (1949) (pl. 67) as belonging to this distinct period following her photographic

studies

when she was working for the Czechoslovak Insti

tute of Labour. Nonetheless, despite the fact that Medkova would soon leave behind such subject (! i

¥

He

matter, these images reflect tendencies.in her work 1

Pll

that she would develop and refine over the follow ing decade. All three images suggest the influence

of Toyen, most notably the series titled Shadow

Cascade of Hair, a work from Play, which makes a visual

allusion to Toyen’s 1946 painting, The Myth of Light (fig. 46). Both works depict the shadows of the artists’

creative partners; in Medkova’s photograph

e painter Mikula’ Medek, and

that of her husband,

in Toyen’s painting that of the poet, Jindrich Heisler.

The mutual influence

upon Medkova and Medek

can be seen in his painting of 1953, /mperialist

Breakfast (Emila and Flies) (fig. 45), with the figure, egg and insects newly

composed.

Untitled (Angel) and Cap with Barometer prefigure Medkova’s later signature work with the use of

the highly textured stone wall that serves as a backdrop to the figures,

creating the tension between

surface and depth, between the close-up frontality

of the image and the impenetrable dark recesses produced, meaning. From the early 1950s the

that would

human figure would disappear entirely from het

logical, inner space. Medkova was greatly influ-

later more explicitly represent psycho-

work and only emerge in suggestively paranoiac

enced by the photography of Jindrich Styrsky from

fashion in partial forms, implying the shape of

the 1930s, and we can see in Untitled (Angel) an

heads, eyes, and genitals, which were most fre-

echo of Styrsky’s 1934 series Man with the Blinkers

quently represented by marks and recesses in walls

and Frog Man, which included numerous photo

and doo ESi

graphs of graveyards and stone angels. Medkova’s

Srp h as defined the years 1948-51 as the ‘prologue’ to Medkova’s photographic oeuvre, and

Angelis permeated with a black humour that is characteristic of Czech surrealism, and in particular

a humour that brings suspicious transpositions back

What was evidently of great significance for

down to earth; the semi-divine, winged creature

Medkova was the recurrence of evocative anthropo-

hewn from stone appears here as much the victim

morphic forms within the fabric of material reality,

of gravity as the inert stone wall behind it.

Medkova joined the re-formed surrealist

and, as we can see in both photographs Eyes and

Arcimboldo 1(1978) (pl.68) what was key to

group in 1951 alongside her husband, and yet was

Medkova’s creative practice was the principle of

sceptical about the creative possibilities that sur-

visual analogy.'? This principle is of fundarnental

realism offered her at this time. In January 1951,

importance to Czech surrealism, and it occupied

Effenberger proposed the first ‘Enquiry on Surreal-

rnuch of Effenberger’s writings as well as the collec-

ism’. To the question ‘Do you consider yourself a

tive games of the Czech group in the 1970s. It is

surrealist?’, Medkova replied alongside her husband

also the concept from which the Czech group took

Medek as follows: ‘We don‘t regard ourselves as

the name for its periodical, Analogon, first pub-

Surrealists .... We think that the world of poetry

lished in 1969. Medkova’s Arcimboldo |, an image of

is the world of consciousness — the world of reality.

mangled machinery in the shape of a human head,

We want a dialectical, rough and scientific real-

isrn’."? The Medeks were not alone in their scepti-

cism about surrealism at this time, and for a while Effenberger considered abandoning the term surrealism altogether and developing the movement under the title of ‘objective poetry’.'° »

16

Medkova’s

photographs throughout the 1950s seem to illus-

trate the pursuit of this dialectical notion of ‘objective poetry’, with their revelations of spectral and paranoiac forms within the apparently banal surface

of £ the everyday. To the question ‘Why do you write/ paint?’ Medkova answered: ‘| photograph to docu-

ment objective and subjective situations that | con-

sider to be significant’.'’ Medkova’s work thus reflects the theoretical impetus of Czech surrealism to produce an encounter between the psychological and

material realities of daily life that aims not only to produce the unexpected, but also to prompt a greater critical awareness of the relationship between the

unconscious and visual cognition; something that the surrealist group would explore throughout their

image-based interpretational games of the 1970s.” Fig.47

Emila Medkova, Snowhead, 1949.

Black-and-white photograph, 38.5 Estate of Ernila Medkova.

28cm.

is from her final cycle of photographs The End of

ieties and disquieting realms of the unconscious,

Illusions, and it relates to a period of investigative

depicted in oil painting through a deceptively naive

experimental activity into the interpretation of

symbolism. Her work is extremely multifaceted,

images. During this time numerous members of

however, and she worked in oils, collage, ceramics,

the group, including Jan Svankmajer and Eva

as well as writing poetry and prose, and from 1967

Svankmajerova, produced variations on the theme

to 2005 produced stage and costume designs and

of the work of the sixteenth-century Mannerist

animated drawings for her husband’s films. Recur-

painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Drawing a parallel

rent themes within Svankmajerova’s work are child-

between the kind of visual and morphological

parent relations, gender relations, and the vicissi-

analogies at play in the work of Arcimboldo and that

tudes of the female psyche at various stages of life.

of Dali, Svankmajerova described ‘the Arcimboldo

As with Toyen and Medkova, anxiety plays a large

principle’ as ‘a paranoid view of depicting’

role in Svankmajerova’s oeuvre, and yet the anxieties

(fig. 52).2° Although Medkova’s Arcimboldesque

she expresses are far less opaque and far more per-

head originates from a period in which its principle

sonal. She paints from raw experience and confronts

was fundamental to the group (pl. 68), it nonethe-

her viewer with a reality that is difficult to flee, and

less occupies a longstanding place in her visual

her work is troubling in its ability to lay bare certain

interaction with the world that can be traced back

basic conditions of physical and psychological real-

to her early photograph Snowhead (1949) (fig. 47).

ity. In relation to one of the collective experiments

While there is an element of playfulness in the

organised by the Czech group in the 1970s, Jan

work of Eva Svankmajerova, it is generally charac-

Svankmajer defined his wife’s artistic character as

terised by an uncompromising exposure of daily anx-

highly determined by her personal history, in particular the relationships of her early childhood, which

he describes as ‘the source of Eva’s basic character trait: the experiencing of everything in a kind of calamitous foreboding’. The film Svankmajerova made with director Jifi

Brdecka in 1971, A Miller Lived by the River (fig. 48), is an early example of the animated drawings that she would continue to make for her husband’s films, and like Svankmajer’s darkly comic adaptation of

the Czech folk tale, Little Otik (2000), this early film deals with the shocking theme of jealous and murderous parents. Such highly visceral themes are hallmarks of Svankmajerova’s work, and the directness

of her subject matter is matched by her raw and naive figurative style. She began to employ this style Fig. 48 Jifi Brdecka (director) and Eva Svankmaje-

rova (design), A Miller Lived by the River, 1971. Film still, 11 minutes, KF a.s. Studio Bratri v triku.

Fig.49

Eva Svankmajerova, Menstruation:

A Lady’s Problem, 1976. Oil on canvas. Jan Svankmajer

in her early years as a painter in the 1960s, when, she has said, she began to paint because she ‘needed to touch the psyche’.** Bruno Solarik, a curren

=

member of the Czech group, has noted how the

artist’s disconcerting force comes from her unflinching ability to represent psychologically disquieting Subject matter in a direct manner. Solarik has observed that Svankmajerova’s position as an artist is disturbingly empowered by her ability to con-

front psychological realities, and by what he calls “a “descent” into the most intimate concreteness of

one’s own fears, anxieties and desires’.*? Solarik suggests that what defines Svankmajerova as an artist in many ways is her ability not only to examine alarm-

ing subject matter, but also to embed herself within

monly associated with fantasy, dreams and beds in

what he calls an ‘outpost’ of anxiety, which she does

the work of Svankmajerova are the source of deep

as a form of protest against artistic sublimations and

discomfort; an association she emphasises in one

squeamish evasions from grisly realities.

of her dream narrations from 1981:

Perhaps the most powerful expression of

‘| remember the

children’s shock when they found out in the night,

Svankmajerova’s protest relates to the female body,

in their own beds with their mother nearby, that

its manipulations, its exploitations, its oppressions

their heads were haunted’.*4

and restrictions. Her paintings frequently depict

What numerous Czech surrealists have observ-

women in domestic situations, furnished by sinister

ed in the work of Svankmajerova is something that

beds and kitchen tables, into which the female body

is highly characteristic of Czech surrealism in gen-

frequently metamorphoses. Bed (1976) (pl. 113) was

eral, and that is its strong black humour.*° This was

painted the in same year as Menstruation:A Lady’s

a wnubject which occupied Effenberger’s writings,

Problem (fig. 49). Both works include the central

and, in his ‘Variants, Constants, and Dominants of

image of f rectangular folds of red, and address the

Surrealism’, he described black humour as ‘the most

onely domain of female bodily anxiety and the

authentic weapon of poetry’, armed with which,

raumatic initiatory experiences of women’s sexual

he argued ‘it is possible to face the danger of the

f

+

lives. Svankmajerova’s surrealism is without whimsy,

mutual isolation of the inner and the outer human

and the site of the bed, perhaps more commonly

world’.@6 It is thus perhaps this black humour that

associated with oneiric or sexual activity in surreal-

enabled Svankmajerovd to deal so unreservedly

ism, is in her work a frequent site of disturbance

with so much raw subject matter. The plaster

that relates back to childhood. Like other subjects

bust, Surrealist Personality Without a Face (1995)

which might otherwise in surrealism be more com-

(fig. 50 and pl. 112) expresses not so much the

Fig.50

Eva Svankmajerova

Surrealist Personality Without a Face, 1995

well as in English) and he was consequently edged

out of the group. Much like its Parisian counterpart, Czech surreal-

ism was nourished by intra-subjective exchanges

and the dynamics of collective creativity. It could be argued, though, that the strength of these relations was somehow incubated by the particularly adverse historical conditions in which the Czech group developed over time. As a consequence of these conditions, and the attitude with which the group confronted them, profound intimate creative and critical relations were established. This led to the develop-

ment of a kind of collective dialogue between

the members of the group and their predecessors, whether through their art and writing or through their continuing physical presence in Prague. The work of Toyen, Medkova and Svankmajerova com-

municates through this kind of dialogue, which is at black humour but rather the dry wit that can be

once reflected in the perceptual and psychological

found throughout Czech surrealist art and writing,

concerns that have remained a constant within the

and it also relates to the political and economical

Czech group, as well as in their intense responses

shifts in Czech culture that directly affected the sur-

to the specific times in which they lived.

realist group. This sculpture was one of a number of

plaster busts of members of the Czech group that

Svankmajerova made in the early 1990s, which now

Notes

1 Teige (2003), 20-21.

sit on the outer staircase to the Svankmajers’ resi-

Teige (2003), 21.

dence in Horni Stankov, south-west Bohemia. The

See Svankmajerova and Svankmajer (1997), 11.

other busts do in fact have faces, while the face of

Svankmajerova and Svankmajer (1997), 12.

Jifi Koubek, who joined the group in the late 1970s,

has been replaced by the inscription “Surrealist

Effenberger (2004a), 6.

Svankmajer (2004), 67. PR) Toyen Go 4S OF 1G) —~I'

did not work

directly with Effenberger, owing to the fact

that she left Prague in 1947 and joined the Parisian surrealists.

Personality Without a Face’. Following the Velvet

However, the two groups remained in very close contact until

Revolution in 1989, Koubek found work in television

the split within the Paris group in 1969. Contact between the Prague and the Paris group was impossible during the Stalinist

broadcasting and became involved in a corruption

dictatorship of the 1950s, and it was not until 1966 that Effe

scandal. Such activity finally made his position

berger, Medkova and the poet Josef Istler visited Toyen in Paris

untenable within the surrealist group with whom he

had ‘lost face’ (as the expression works in Czech as

n-

in 1966.

8 Inanumber of essays written in the 1970s, Effenberger outlined he Czech group’s position concerning the shifts surrealism had

Fig.51

Jan Svankmajer

Dimensions of Dialogue, 1982

Film still. Jan Svankmajer to take in the Czechoslovak Republic after the war in order for the movement to retain its critical significance. In the essay, ‘Variants,

Constants and Dominants of Surrealism,’ (1966-67), Effenberger drew attention to one of the greatest distinctions between the historical epochs of pre- and post-war surrealism. He argued that while the concrete irrational had real claims to unmasking the

perfidious logic of the so-called rational, everyday reality that was the object of surrealist critique before the war, it had been weakened as a critical tool during and after

the war. This, he argued,

was due to the fact that the growing irrationality of everyday reality had become increasingly obvious: ‘Irrationality in its most concrete forms penetrated everyday life without the assistance

of poets, and fear, together with indifference, became the basic sensation of life’ (Effenberger [20044], 6). In another essay from 1975, ‘The Negation of Negation is not Negativism’, which out-

ined the Czech group’s attempts to redevelop surrealism from a restrictively critical movement to a more profoundly creative one,

Effenberger described how the differences between pre- and post-war surrealism had to be understood from the perspective

of the changing character of historical reality itself: ‘The streets in which surrealists were looking for the marvellous had changed between the wars. From the 1940s, it was a different

irrationality

hat | had discovered there. This irrationality, produced by decadent rationality, burst with a humour so objective that all you had o do was place it in front of a camera or on a stage for its rationalist shell to crack open and a purifying sarcasm to leap out’

(Effenberger [2003b], 28-29). Such observations seem very For amore extensive discussion of this term see Fijalkowski

Oignant in the context of Medkova’s photography in particular.

(2005), 167.

Breton (1953), 83.

Effenberger (2003), 3.

10 Srp (2000), 12. 11

Srp (2000), 179.

For a discussion of the Czech group’s experimental games,

The Czech surrealist group experienced a series of oppressive

see Fijalkowski (spring 2005).

and traumatic events. With the onset of Communist rule in 1948,

For a discussion of anthropomorphism and analogy in Medkova’s

the authorities staged a number of show trials, one of which

work, see Nadvornikova (1977) and Srp (2005).

resulted in the execution of Zavis Kalandra in 1950. Kalandra

20 Svankmajerova and Svankmajer (1997), 141. Giuseppe Arcim-

was a Leninist journalist who had developed surrealist sympathies

boldo was court painter to the Emperor Rudolf Il of Prague as well

in the 1930s, and was persecuted for his anti-Stalinist position.

as being the keeper of the Emperor’s prestigious Wunder-

nthe year that followed, Teige lived in mortal fear of a similar

kammer. He produced court portraits in which the sitters’ heads

ate, and died of a heart attack in October 1951 following a pro-

were composed of a myriad objects, including frui and vegeta-

onged press campaign against him. Although the Czech group

bles, fish, animals, and vegetation. Jan Svankmajer has produced

experienced relative liberalism throughout the 1960s, the inva-

a large number of collages and sculptures which play on the

sion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 led

theme of Arcimboldo’s work, as well as exploring the metamorphosing character of the Arcimboldesque in animated films, such

o arenewed restriction on freedom of expression and a period

as Dimensions of Dialogue, 1982 (fig. 51). For further discussion

of intense censorship termed ‘normalisation’, which again forced

of Medkova’s Arcimboldo |, see Fijalkowski (autumn 2005).

the surrealist group into virtual isolation. Jan Svankmajer was

13 14 15

Svankmajerova and Svankmajer (1997), 14.

banned from making films between 1973 and 1979, and the

21

surrealist group could neither exhibit its work in public nor openly

22 Svankmajerova and Svankmajer (1997), 31.

publish.

23 Solarik (2005), 19.

Srp (2000), 288.

24 Svankmajerova and Svankmajer (1997), 136.

Srp (2005), 6.

25 Solarik (2005), 19.

Effenberger (2003), 5.

26 Effenberger (2004a), 7.

Loree ee

Seton SHI oie

2 exci eerie, v3as

ac

siease

Le

2.Marion Adnams

The Living

Tree, 1939

3. Eileen Agar Angel of Anarchy, 1936-40

4. Eileen Agar Angel of Mercy, 1934

6. Eileen Agar Coral Seahorse, 1935

f.tileen AGar

ROCKS al FlouManachn, BIITCANY, 1350

Eileen Agar

Ladybird, 1°

9. Eileen Agar Self-Portrait, 1928

a

10. Lola Alvarez Bravo

Cuarto de Frida [Frida’s room|, 1954

11. Lola Alvarez Bravo. Frida sentada contra la ventana [Frida Kahlo Seated Arms Crossed, Close Up}, c. 1945

12. Lola Alvarez Bravo

Frida sentada junto a ventana [Frida Kahlo Seated Below Mirror in Canopy, Hands Crossed], c.1945

13. Lola Alvarez Bravo

Frida enfrentedel espejo [Frida Kahlo Sitting at her Dressing Table Facing Mirror],

c.1945

14. Lola Alvarez Bravo.

Frida parada junto a muro [Frida Kahlo Facing Mirror in Patio],

c. 1944

|5.R ach el Be 1€25 La Polka

[The

Polka

}, 1946

16. Rachel Baes

La Naissance du secret [The Birth of the Secret], 1948

17. Andre Breton and Elisa Breton

Bouquet, 1959

18. Elisa Breton

Untitled, n.d.

19. Emmy Bridgwater

Transplanted, 1947

20. Emmy Bridgwater

Leda and the Swan, c. 1950

e1'.Cldude Canun

Sel-portrait (kneeling on quilt), c. 1928

23. Claude Cahun

Self-portrait, c.1920

24. Claude Cahun

Se/f-portrait, c. 1928

25. Claude Cahun

View over Rocks, n.d.

26. Claude Cahun

Untitled (Still Life on Rocks),

pine

sr x

¢.1935

7. Claude

Cahun

Pour que tu vives une heure [So that you can live for an hour], 1936

28.

Claude Cahun

Feathers, bird, sword

and drape, c.1936

29. Claude Cahun

Jacqueline Lamba, 1939

30. Leonora Carrington

Self-portrait, c. 1937-38

3}. Leonora Carrington Arbol de la Vida| The Tree ofLife], 1960

32. Leonora Carrington

Mundo Magico de los Mayas [The Magical World of the Mayans], 1963

33. |thell Colquhoun

Scylla, 1938

1A

Nhell

Colquhoun

[ree AnAlorny, ‘

GAZ

> MEH

COMUNOUN

A VISILatIOn, 1944

36. Ithell Colquhoun

Gorgon, 1946

1?

Nusch Eluard

Untitled (Nudes Dancing around

a Gold Chalice), c.1936

2 D) 8.

Josette

Exandier

La Perte de

memoire [The Loss of

Memory, 19

40. Josette Exandier

La Caresse [The Caress], 1999

>

31. LSonor Rin) Hea oF 3 Woman Cc 1935

12,

Leonor Fink

The Alcove;

An Interior with Three Women,

©, 939

13, Leonor Fini

L'Ombrelle |The Parasol], 1947

44. Leonor Fini Petit Sphinx hermite [Little Hermit Sphinx], 1948

1j

|

|

)

45. Leonor Fini LAnge de I’'anatomie [The Angel of Anatomy, 1949

onor Fini Le Bout du monde [The Ends of the Earth], 1°

+f. JANE Gfdverol

LECOIE de Id vanite |1NE SCNOO!OF vanity|, 1967

~

ee

nt

cs

Sieeipcaseanminmem sah mmmenmtemesmeme

pestis

— SS Senses —— ese

nee ne essa

na eee

ee

2

oo)

ie >

=

1 Prison celeste [The Celestial Prison], 1°

»

50. Jane Graverol

Les Derniers Plaisirs |Last Pleasures|,

1962

2.

Valentine Hugo

Portraitot Rene

Char (lustration tom Placard pour un

Chemin des ecolers), V947

53. Valentine Hugo

Plate VIII from Eugénie de Franval by de Sade. Published by Georges Artigues, Paris, 1948

A

H

$e

i

oe

54. Frida Kahlo

Diego y Frida 1929-1944 (I) [Diego and Frida 1929-1944], [also called Double Portrait of Diego and Me (1), 1944]

55. Frida Kahlo

Naturaleza muerta con perico y bandera {Still Life with Parrot and Flag], 1951

56.

Frida Kahlo

Naturaleza muerta (Soy de Samuel

Fastlicht) [Still Life (lBelong To Samuel Fastlicht)], 1951

57. Frida Kahlo Elsoly la vida [Sun and Life], 1947

58. Frida Kahlo Naturaleza muerta con sandias [Still Life with Watermelons}, 1953

19, Fricla Kahlo

Caballito Mexican [Little Mexican Horse], 1928

60. Frida Kahlo

View of Central Park, 19

Y Hi:

SESS

Za y)

Oe

Dota

Maat

(aka Henriette

Theodora

Markovitch)

Sars titre (Main-coquillage) (Untitled (Hand and Shel), 1934

65.

Dora Maar (aka Henriette Theodora Markovitch)

Le Simulateur [The Pretender

67. Emila

Medkova

Haarwasserfall|Cascade of Hair| frorn the cycle

Schattenspiele

|Shadow

Games|, \949

G8,

Eintla

Mecdkova

Arcimboldo|, 1978

69. Emila Medkova

Untitled (Angel), November 1948

70. Emila

Nedkova

Eyes, 1965

71. Emila Medkova

Cap with Barometer, 1949

72. Lee Miller

Self-portrait with Sphinxes, Vogue studio 1940

73. Lee Miller

Revenge on Culture (from the 1940 publication Grim Glory)

74. Lee Miller

Severed breast from radical surgery in a place setting (Still Life - Amputated Breast on Plate) c.1929

75, Lee Miller

Cock Rock (The Native), 1939

76. Lee Miller

Collage, 1937

ie fn

SS ane

‘yrecoeee

‘yeu oesoe peoee cee? ¢ WITLI? mr

ie ee

e

77.Lee Miller Portrait of Space, 1937

78. Lee Miller Dorothea Tanning, Sedona Arizona, 1946

79. Lee Miller Nusch Eluard by the side ofacar, Mougins 1937

80. Lee Miller

Leonor Fini, Saint Martin d’Ardéche, 1939

aoe dee

aoe

81. Lee Miller

Leonora Carrington, Saint Martin d’Ardéche, 193°

2.Lee Miller

Valentine Penrose and Antony Penrose, Farley Farm, 1952

83. Lee Miller

Dora Maar, Mougins, 1937

84. Lee Miller

Eileen Agar and Gc olden Tooth Sculpture, 1937

85. Lee Miller

Solarized Portrait (thought to be Meret Oppenheim), Paris, 1930

86. Meret Oppenheim

Gespenst mit Leintuch [Ghost with Sheet], 1962

87. Meret Oppenheim

Portrait (Photo) mit Tatowierung [Portrait (Photo) with Tattoos], June 1980

88. Meret Oppenheim

Eichhdrnchen [Squirrel], 1969

89. Meret Oppenheim

Pelzhandschuhe [Fur Gloves with Wooden Fingers], 1936-39

90. Meret Oppenheim

Poster Pelztasse (nach Photo Man Ray) [Fur Cup Poster (after Man Ray’s photo), 1971

91.Meret Oppenheim

Andenken an das Pelzfrlihsttick [Souvenir of Breakfast in Fur], 1970

92. Meret Oppenheim

Wolke auf einem Schiff [Cloud on a Boat], 1963

93. Grace Pailthorpe

March 77, 1938

Men, 39 NES

94. Mimi Parent

Léda et le cygne [Leda and the Swan], 1997

95. Mimi Parent Maitresse [Mistress], 1996

96. Valentine Penrose

La Fin de la guerre [The End of the War], 1934-42

97. Valentine Penrose

Ariane, 1934-42

98. Valentine Penrose

The Fog, 1942

99. Valentine Penrose

Les Fées | [The Fairies |], 1934-42

100. Edith Rimmington

The Oneiroscopist, 1947

101. Edith Rimmington_

Relative Strength, 1950

102. Edith Rimmington

Sisters of Anarchy, 1940-41

04. Kay sage

Marginof silence,

\942

105. Kay Sage e

The Hidden Letter, 1943

107. Kay Sage

Tomorrow is Never, 1955

ny

:

eS

108. Kay Sage Starlings, Caravans, 1948

109. Penny Slinger

Teeth Like Flocks of Doves, 1972

110. Penny Slinger | Hear What you Say, 1973

I i

artist

ADEA ARS Tai

Bt Aha

Vind

111. Penny Slinger Read My Lips, 1973

Eva Svankmajerova

Surrealist Personality Without a Face, 1995

113. Eva Svankmajerova

Bed, 1976

114. Dorothea Tanning

Eine kleine Nachtmusik, 1943

115. Dorothea Tanning

Pincushion to Serve as Fetish, 1965

116. Toyen

Untitled, 1930-40

117. Toyen

LAvant-printemps [Early Spring], 1945

118. Unknown

Cast of Lee Miller’s Torso, c. 1942

119. Unknown

Sheila Legge as a Surrealist Phantom in Trafalgar Square, for the International Surrealist Exhibition, 1936

120. Unknown.

International Surrealist Exhibition, 1936 (Diana Brinto-Lee, Salvador Dali (in diving suit), Rupert Lee, Paul Eluard, Nusch Eluard, ELT Mesens)

121. Unknown

The First International Surrealist Exhibition,

New Burlington Galleries, London, England, June 1936

(L to R standing: Rupert Lee, David Gascoyne, Salvador Dali, Paul Eluard, Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, ELT Mesens, George Reavey, Hugh Sykes Davies; L to R seated: Diana Brinton Lee, Nusch Eluard, Eileen Agar, Sheila

Legge and unidentified friend of Dali)

122. Remedios Varo

The Child’s Mother and the Kidnapper Argue, 1935

= Q Dy,

Rem

1e

dios Varo

Insomnia, 19

5

124. Francesca Woodman.

Self-portraitat 13, Boulder, Colorado, 1972

125. Francesca Woodman

House #3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

1260. Francesca Woodman

From Angel Series, Rome, ltaly, 1977

:i 4

127. Francesca Woodman

“On Being an Angel #1”, Providence, Rhode Island, 1977

128. Francesca Woodman

ENS SS

Untitled, Rome, Italy, 1977-78

129. Francesca Woodman

From the three

kinds of melon in four kinds

of light series, 1975-78

131, André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy

Cadavre exquis [Exquisite Corpse], 1938

132. Andre Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy

Cadavre exquis, 1938

133. Eileen Agar, John Banting, (Antonio Pedro) Da Costa, Roland Penrose

Cadavre exquis, c. 1939

los. Meret Oppenheim, ANNd bOett, RODEO LUPO

stun Tur die NeumMondnacntle |Call TOF NIGNLS OF TNE NEW MOON}, 1D f5

daewre

lu ye

135. Roberto Lupo, Meret Oppenheim, Anna Boetti

Grosser King-Kong Stuhl [Large King Kong Chair], 1975

Rebel

(At ue

136. Meret Oppenheim, Anna Boetti, Roberto Lupo (from top to bottom) Stuhl flir einen gelehrten Hund [Chair for Canine Scholar], 1975

137. Valentine Hugo, André Breton, Anonymous

Cadavre exquis, 1931

138. Nusch

Eluard, Greta Knutson, Valentine Hugo, André Breton

rice a

Coren

ha:

€) hi

i

tenes enn

|\ i f

Cadavre exquis, c. 1930

, Valentine Hugo,

Paul Elua

IVI EXG

140. Nusch Eluard, Valentine Hugo, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard

¢

vre exquis, C. 1930

141. Greta Knutson, Tristan Tzara, Valentine Hugo

ion

OPS Ray

ERC arr

C

exquis, 1°

List of Works

LIST OF WORKS All dimensions are in cm height x width x depth

(unframed dimensions unless otherwise stated)

1. Marion Adnams

5. Eileen Agar

9. Eileen Agar

The Distraught Infanta, 1944

Precious Stones, 1936

Self-Portrait, 1928

Oil on panel

Collage

Pen and ink on paper

53.5x43.3

26x 20.9

28x20

Manchester City Galleries

Leeds Museums and Galleries

Peter Lanigan O’Keefe

(City Art Gallery) 10. Lola Alvarez Bravo

2. Marion Adnams

The Living Tree, 1939

6. Eileen Agar

Cuarto de Frida [Frida’s Room], c. 1954

Oil on panel

Coral Seahorse, 1935

Photograph

61x43

Object: box with mixed media (coral, sea-

20x26

Manchester City Galleries

horse, eye of horus, watercolour)

Courtesy of Galeria Juan Martin, property of

16.4x22.4x5.5

Manuel Alvarez Bravo Martinez

3. Eileen Agar

Private collection, courtesy The Mayor

Angel of Anarchy, 1936-40

Gallery, London

11. Lola Alvarez Bravo

Frida sentada contra la ventana [Frida Kahlo

Textiles over plaster and mixed media

Seated Arms Crossed, Close up}, c. 1945

S263) PES

7. Eileen Agar

Tate. Presented by the Friends of Tate Gallery

Rocks at Ploumanach, Brittany, 1936

Photograph

Silver gelatine print

26x20

4. Eileen Agar

15.5x15.5 (paper 15.9x15.6)

Courtesy of Galeria Juan Martin, property of

Angel of Mercy, 1934

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Manuel Alvarez Bravo Martinez

Plaster with collage and watercolour 46 x 25x 36

8. Eileen Agar

The Sherwin Collection

Ladybird, 1936

Photograph and gouache 76x49

Private collection, courtesy The Mayor

Gallery, London

12. Lola Alvarez Bravo

17. André Breton and Elisa Breton

23. Claude Cahun

Frida sentada junto a ventana [Frida Kahlo

Bouquet, 1959

Self-portrait, c. 1920

Seated Below Mirror in Canopy, Hands

Assemblage: cork and coloured glass in a

Photograph

Crossed, c. 1945

cardboard box

WN

Photograph

18.5x16.5x 4.2

Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections

26x 20

The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of

S53

Courtesy of Galeria Juan Martin, property of

Dada and Surrealist Art

24. Claude Cahun

Manuel Alvarez Bravo Martinez

The Israel Museum Jerusalem

Self-portrait, c. 1928

13. Lola Alvarez Bravo

18. Elisa Breton

19x 23.7

Frida entrente del espejo |Frida Kahlo Sitting

Untitled, n.d.

Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections

Photograph

at her Dressing Table Facing Mirror], c. 1945

Assemblage: embalmed birds of paradise,

Photograph

display unit with red painted metallic

26x20

Mexican egg, natural foam, and mink

View over Rocks, n.d.

Courtesy of Galeria Juan Martin, property of

head in a box lined with blue velvet

Photograph

Manuel Alvarez Bravo Martinez

42x 36x 31.5

SOUS

The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of

Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections

25. Claude Cahun

14. Lola Alvarez Bravo

Dada and Surrealist Art

Frida parada junto a muro [Frida Kahlo

The Israel Museum Jerusalem

26. Claude Cahun

19. Emmy Bridgwater

Photograph

Untitled (Still Life on Rocks), c. 1935

Facing Mirror in Patio], c. 1944 Photograph 26x20

Transplanted, 1947

12x8.8

Galeria Juan Martin, Mexico City and Manuel

Oil on paper

Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections

Alvarez Bravo Martinez

52x36 The Sherwin Collection

27. Claude Cahun Pour que tu vives une heure

15. Rachel Baes

La Polka |The Polka], 1946

20. Emmy Bridgwater

[So that you can live for an hour), 1936

Oil on canvas

Leda and the Swan, c.1950

Photograph

81x65

Collage

15.4x22.8

Private collection, Ecaussinnes (Belgium)

30x 24

Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections

The Sherwin Collection

28. Claude Cahun

16. Rachel Baes La Naissance du secret [The Birth of the

21. Claude Cahun

Feathers, bird, sword and drape, c. 1936

Secret], 1948

Self-portrait (kneeling on quilt), c.1928

Photograph

Oil on canvas

Photograph

11.8x15.1

65x54

11.8x8.8

Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections

Private collection, Ecaussinnes (Belgium)

Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections

29. Claude Cahun 22. Claude Cahun

Jacqueline Lamba, 1939

Self-portrait, 1927

Photograph

Photograph

OxXGS

MS

Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections

Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections

30. Leonora Carrington

36. Ithell Colquhoun

Self-portrait, c. 1937-38

Gorgon, 1946

The Alcove: An Interior with Three Women,

Oil on canvas

Oil on board

€, 1S)

65x 81.3

58x58

Oil on canvas

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Pierre

Private collection

and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, 2002

42. Léonor Fini

83.5x58 The Edward James Foundation Limited

37. Nusch Eluard 31. Leonora Carrington

Untitled (Nudes Dancing around a Gold

Arbol de la Vida [The Tree of Life], 1960

Chalice), c. 1936

L’Ombrelle [The Parasol], 1947

Oil on canvas

Photomontage

Oil on canvas

OK 54

8.5x14

56x46.5

Private collection, courtesy of Galeria Arvil,

Private collection, courtesy The Mayor

The Edward James Foundation Limited

Mexico

Gallery, London

32. Leonora Carrington

38. Josette Exandier

Mundo Magico de los Mayas {|The Magical

La Perte de mémoire |The Loss of Memory,

1948

World of the Mayans], 1963

1988

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

Mixed media

41.1x24.4x2.1

63.5 x106.5

40x 21x33

Tate.

Private collection, courtesy of Galeria Arvil,

Brann Renaud

43. Leonor Fini

44. Leonor Fini

Petit Sphinx hermite [Little Hermit Sphinx\,

Lent by a private collector in memory of Rafael Martinez, 2002

Mexico

39. Josette Exandier

33. Ithell Colquhoun

La Divination [Divination], 1990

Scylla, 1938

Glass eyes, coral, clay animal

L’Ange de l’anatomie [The Angel of

Oil on canvas

11.5x17x12

Anatomy], 1949

91.5x61

Collection MONY VIBESCU

Oil on canvas

Tate. Purchased 1977

45. Léonor Fini

DSxXot

40. Josette Exandier 34. Ithell Colquhuon

La Caresse [The Caress], 1999

Private collection

Tree Anatomy, 1942

Wood, dried flowers

46. Leonor Fini

Oil on wood panel

33x22 x12

Le Bout du monde {The Ends of the Earth],

57x29

Collection MONY VIBESCU

1948

Oil on canvas

The Sherwin Collection 41. Léonor Fini

35x28

35. Ithell Colquhoun

Head of aWoman, c. 1935

Private collection

A Visitation, 1944

Ink and wash

Oil on canvas

121 OS

59x49

James Birch

Private collection, courtesy The Mayor Gallery, London

47. Jane Graverol

53. Valentine Hugo

59. Frida Kahlo

L’Ecole de la vanité [The School of Vanity,

Plate Vill from Eugénie de Franval by de

Caballito Mexican {Little Mexican Horse},

1967

Sade. Published by Georges Artigues, Paris,

1928

Oil and collage on panel

1948

Watercolour on paper

62x98

Drypoint etching on paper

20X33

R. Ortmans

265x119

Private collection, courtesy of Galeria Arvil

Collection Paul Conran

48. Jane Graverol

60. Frida Kahlo

La Prison céleste |The Celestial Prison], 1963

54. Frida Kahlo

View of Central Park, 1932

Oil on canvas

Diego y Frida 1929-1944 (|) [Diego and

Watercolour on paper

92x65

Frida 1929-1944], [also called Double

26.7xX20.3

Collection Liana Zanfrisco, Italy

Portrait of Diego and Me (1)], 1944

Private collection, courtesy of Galeria Arvil

Oil on wood with painted shell frame 49. Jane Graverol

26 x18.5

61. Dora Maar (aka Henriette Theodora

L'Esprit saint [The Holy Spirit], 1965

Private collection

Markovitch)

63.5x54.5

55. Frida Kahlo

Gelatin print mounted to modern board

Private collection, Dilbeek, Belgium

Naturaleza muerta con perico y bandera

39.5x27.9

[Still Life with Parrot and Flag], 1951

The Bluff Collection LP

Pere Ubu, 1936

Oil on canvas

50. Jane Graverol

Oil on masonite

Les Derniers Plaisirs [Last Pleasures], 1962

26x35

Oil on canvas

Private collection, courtesy of Galeria Arvil

62. Dora Maar (aka Henriette Theodora arkovitch) Sans titre (Main-coquillage) [Untitled

42.5x62.5 56. Frida Kahlo

Hand and Shell), 1934

Naturaleza muerta (Soy de Samuel Fastlicht)

Photomontage

51. Valentine Hugo

[Still Life (IBelong To Samuel

30x 23.7

Illustration from Appliquée by Paul Eluard,

Fastlicht)], 1951

1937

Oil on masonite

Drypoint etching on paper

28.5x 36

19x13.5

Private collection, courtesy of Galeria Arvil

Collection MONY VIBESCU

63. Dora Maar (aka Henriette Theodora

Markovitch)

Collection Paul Conran

52. Valentine Hugo

usée national d’Art moderne — Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

57. Frida Kahlo

Nusch Eluard, c. 1935

El sol y la vida [Sun and Life], 1947

Silver-gelatin print 24.5x18

Portrait of René Char(illustration from Plac-

Oil on masonite

ard pour un Chemin des écoliers), 1937

40x50

Musée national d’Art moderne — Centre

Drypoint etching on paper

Private collection, courtesy of Galeria Arvil

Georges Pompidou, Paris

22x16.5 Collection Paul Conran

58. Frida Kahlo Naturaleza muerta con sandias [Still Life with Watermelons], 1953 Oil on masonite

39x59 Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City

64. Dora Maar (aka Henriette Theodora

70. Emila Medkova

Markovitch)

Eyes, 1965

Collage, 1937

Léonor Fini, 1936

Black-and-white photograph

Collage, printed and non-printed papers

Silver-gelatin print

IRS SSM)

28X21.5

30.3x23.7

Estate of Emila Medkova

Lee Miller Archives, England

71. Emila Medkova

77. Lee Miller

76. Lee Miller

Musée national d’Art moderne — Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Cap with Barometer, 1949

Portrait of Space, 1937

65. Dora Maar (aka Henriette Theodora

Black-and-white photograph

Photograph

Markovitch)

39.7X29.7

30x27.8

Le Simulateur [The Pretender], 1936

Estate of Emila Medkova

Lee Miller Archives, England

PQ) PODS)

72. Lee Miller

78. Lee Miller

Collection of the Sack Photographic Trust

Self-portrait with Sphinxes, Vogue studio,

Dorothea Tanning, Sedona Arizona, 1946

of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

1940

Photograph

Silver-gelatin print

Photograph

26.5x25.5

66. Dora Maar (aka Henriette Theodora

19.5x24.3

Lee Miller Archives, England

Markovitch)

Lee Miller Archives, England

79. Lee Miller

Untitled Self-portrait, c. 1938 Silver-gelatin print

73. Lee Miller

29.85 x 23.8]

Revenge on Culture (from the 1940 publica-

1937

Promised gift of Paul Sack to the Sack Photo-

tion Grim Glory)

Photograph

graphic Trust of the San Francisco Museum

Photograph

222x803)

of Modern Art

25.2x 24.2

Lee Miller Archives, England

Nusch Eluard by the side of a car, Mougins

Lee Miller Archives, England 80. Lee Miller

67. Emila Medkova

Haarwasserfall [Cascade of Hair| from the

74. Lee Miller

cycle Schattenspiele [Shadow

Severed breast from radical surgery in a

Photograph

Games], 1949

place setting (Still Life —Amputated Breast

26.5x25.5

Black-and-white photograph

on Plate), c. 1929

Lee Miller Archives, England

S9oxKsS0

Two photographs

Estate of Emila Medkova

15x10 (each photograph)

81. Lee Miller

Lee Miller Archives, England

Leonora Carrington, Saint Martin d’Ardéche,

75. Lee Miller

Photograph

1939

68. Emila Medkova Arcimboldo |, 1978

Léonor Fini, Saint Martin d’Ardéche, 1939

Black-and-white photograph

Cock Rock (The Native), 1939

26.5x 25.5

29.7X23.8

Photograph

Lee Miller Archives, England

Estate of Emila Medkova

265x255) Lee Miller Archives, England

69. Emila Medkova Untitled (Angel), November 1948 Black-and-white photograph 19x18

Estate of Emila Medkova

82. Lee Miller

88. Meret Oppenheim

Valentine Penrose and Antony Penrose,

Eichhornchen [Squirrel], 1969

Léda et le cygne [Leda and the Swan), 1997

Farley Farm, 1952

Beerglass, foam material, fur

Gouache on mixed media in wooden box

Photograph

21.5x13x75

54x46 x16

26.2x25.5

Private collection

Collection MONY VIBESCU

94, Mimi Parent

Lee Miller Archives, England 89. Meret Oppenheim

95. Mimi Parent

83. Lee Miller

Pelzhandschuhe [Fur Gloves with Wooden

Maitresse [Mistress], 1996

Dora Maar, Mougins, 1937

Fingers], 1936-39

Hair, leather, wooden box

Photograph

Fur gloves with wooden fingers in a plexiglas

475x35x5.6

21.3x30.3

box

Collection MONY VIBESCU

Lee Miller Archives, England

21x10x5 each Hauser & Wirth Collection, Switzerland

84. Lee Miller

96. Valentine Penrose

La Fin de la guerre |The End of the War],

Eileen Agar and Golden Tooth Sculpture,

90. Meret Oppenheim

1934-42

1937

Poster Pelztasse (nach Photo Man Ray)

Collage

Photograph

[Fur Cup Poster (after Man Ray’s photo)),

31.4 x44 (framed)

26.6x25.5

1971

The Penrose Collection

Lee Miller Archives, England

Offset print

85. Lee Miller

53x76

97. Valentine Penrose

Private collection

Ariane, 1934-42

Solarized Portrait (thought to be Meret

Collage

Oppenheim), Paris, 1930

91. Meret Oppenheim

19.5x 25.5

Photograph

Andenken an das Pelzfrulhstuck [Souvenir of

The Penrose Collection

22.8x17.7

Breakfast in Fur|, 1970

Lee Miller Archives, England

Collage on paper

86. Meret Oppenheim

The Fog, 1942

Private collection

Collage

92. Meret Oppenheim

The Penrose Collection

Gespenst mit Leintuch [Ghost with Sheet], 1962

98. Valentine Penrose

17.5x20x4

16.2x 20.3

Carved and painted wood, polyester sheet

Wolke auf einem Schiff |Cloud on a Boat],

130.5x28.5x19

1963

Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, Vaduz

Plaster over metal armature

Les Fées I[The Fairies |], 1934-42

36.99 x 33.02 x12.07

Collage

99. Valentine Penrose

87. Meret Oppenheim

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of

17x24

Portrait (Photo) mit Tatowierung [Portrait

David A. Kaplan

The Penrose Collection

(Photo) with Tattoos], June 1980 Stencil and spray on photograph

93. Grace Pailthorpe

29.5x21

March 17, 1938

Private collection

Pencil on paper ZWD PUE

Leeds Museums and Galleries (City Art

Gallery)

100. Edith Rimmington

106. Kay Sage

113. Eva Svankmajerova

The Oneiroscopist, 1947

Hyphen, 1954

Bed, 1976

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

51x41

76.2x50.9

28x35

The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Jan Svankmajer

Dada and Surrealist Art The Israel Museum Jerusalem

107. Kay Sage

114. Dorothea Tanning

Tomorrowis Never, 1955

Eine kleine Nachtmusik, 1943

101. Edith Rimmington

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

Relative Strength, 1950

96.2 x136.8

40.7x61

Pen, ink and watercolour on paper

Metropolitan Museum of Art,

Tate. Purchased with assistance from

52 XS

Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1955

The Art Fund and the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, 1997

Private collection, courtesy The Mayor

Gallery, London

108. Kay Sage

Starlings, Caravans, 1948

115. Dorothea Tanning

102. Edith Rimmington

Oil on canvas

Pincushion to Serve as Fetish, 1965

Sisters of Anarchy, 1940-41

81x99.1

Mixed media

Oil on canvas

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,

37.2x37x45.5

Tate. Purchased 2003

30x35

Museum Purchase, Mildred Anna Williams

The Sherwin Collection

Collection

103. Edith Rimmington

109. Penny Slinger

Untitled, 1930-40

Museum, 1951

Teeth Like Flocks of Doves, 1972

Collage

Pencil, pen, ink and watercolour on paper

Wax life cast with multi media

18x26

382X285

8.6x8.6x8.6

Private collection, courtesy The Mayor

Private collection, courtesy The Mayor

The Penrose Collection

Gallery, London

116. Toyen

Gallery, London

104. Kay Sage

110. Penny Slinger

117. Toyen

| Hear What you Say, 1973

L’Avant-printemps [Early Spring], 1945

Margin of Silence, 1942

Photographic collage

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

35x47

89x146

45.7x38.1

The Penrose Collection

Gift of the Estate of Kay Sage Tanguy

Musée national d’Art moderne — Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Albany Institute of History & Art,

111. Penny Slinger Read MyLips, 1973

118. Unknown

Photographic collage

Cast of Lee Miller’s Torso, c. 1942

The Hidden Letter, 1943

35x47

Plaster cast with necklace

Oil on canvas

The Penrose Collection

105. Kay Sage

55.9x 38.1

54x41.5x25 The Penrose Collection

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Bequest

112. Eva Svankmajerova

of Kay Sage Tanguy

Surrealist Personality Without a Face, 1995 Fired clay

50x 40x10

Jan Svankmajer

119. Unknown

122. Remedios Varo

126. Francesca Woodman

Sheila Legge as a Surrealist Phantom in

The Child’s Mother and the Kidnapper

From Angel Series, Rome, Italy, 1977

Trafalgar Square, for the International

Argue, 1935

Photograph

Surrealist Exhibition, 1936

Collage on paper

9.3x9.3

Photograph

21x17

Courtesy George and Betty Woodman and

14.5x19

The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Private collection, courtesy The Mayor

Dada and Surrealist Art

Gallery, London

The Israel Museum Jerusalem

127. Francesca Woodman

120. Unknown

123. Remedios Varo

Rhode Island, 1977

International Surrealist Exhibition, 1936

Insomnia, 1947

Photograph

(Diana Brinto-Lee, Salvador Dali (in diving

Gouache on paper

13.5x13.5

suit), Rupert Lee, Paul Eluard, Nusch Eluard,

28x22

Courtesy George and Betty Woodman and

ELT Mesens)

The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Photograph

Dada and Surrealist Art

15x20.5

The Israel Museum Jerusalem

128. Francesca Woodman

124. Francesca Woodman

Photograph

“On Being an Angel #1”, Providence,

Untitled, Rome, Italy, 1977-78

Private collection, courtesy The Mayor Gallery

121. Unknown

Self-portrait at 13, Boulder, Colorado, 1972

14.7x14.7

Photograph

Courtesy George and Betty Woodman and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

The First International Surrealist Exhibition,

17x17

New Burlington Galleries, London, England,

Courtesy George and Betty Woodman and

June 1936 (L to R standing: Rupert Lee,

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

129. Francesca Woodman From the three kinds of melon in four kinds

David Gascoyne, Salvador Dali, Paul Eluard, Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, ELT Mesens,

125. Francesca Woodman

of light series, 1975-78

George Reavey, Hugh Sykes Davies; L to R

House #3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

Photograph

seated: Diana Brinton Lee, Nusch Eluard,

Photograph

13x10

Eileen Agar, Sheila Legge and unidentified

16x16

Courtesy George and Betty Woodman and

friend of Dali)

Courtesy George and Betty Woodman and

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

20x25.5

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Photograph

130. Francesca Woodman

Lee Miller Archives, England

Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-78 Photograph 13x13

Courtesy George and Betty Woodman and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

EXOUISITE GORPSES 131. André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy

Cadavre exquis [Exquisite Corpse], 1938 Collage on paper 25.4x 15.2

134. Meret Oppenheim, Anna Boetti,

138. Nusch Eluard, Greta Knutson,

Roberto Lupo

Valentine Hugo, André Breton

Stuhl fir die Neumondndchte |Chair for

Cadavre exquis, c. 1930

Nights of the New Moon], 1975

Coloured crayon on black paper

Gouache

31x24

41.5x29

Musée national d’Art moderne — Centre

Private collection

Georges Pompidou, Paris

Private collection, courtesy The Mayor Gallery, London

132. André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba,

Yves Tanguy Cadavre exquis, 1938

Collage on paper, folded in half 42.2x3]

135. Roberto Lupo, Meret Oppenheim,

139. André Breton, Nusch Eluard,

Anna Boetti

Valentine Hugo, Paul Eluard

Grosser King-Kong Stuhl {Large King Kong

Cadavre exquis, c. 1930

Chair], 1975

Coloured crayon on black paper

Gouache

31x24

41.5x29

Tate. Purchased 2005

Private collection

140. Nusch Eluard, Valentine Hugo,

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 136. Meret Oppenheim, Anna Boetti,

133. Eileen Agar, John Banting, (Antonio

Pedro) Da Costa, Roland Penrose Cadavre exquis, Cc. 1939 Ink on paper

22.8xX8.6 The Sherwin Collection

André Breton, Paul Eluard

Roberto Lupo (from top to bottom)

Cadavre exquis, c. 1930

Stuhl fur einen gelehrten Hund [Chair for

Coloured crayon on black paper

Canine Scholar], 1975

BZ.

Gouache

Private collection, courtesy The Mayor

2am

41.5x29

Gallery, London

Private collection

141. Greta Knutson, Tristan Tzara,

137. Valentine Hugo, Andre Breton,

Valentine Hugo

Anonymous

Cadavre exquis, 1929

Cadavre exquis, 1931

Coloured crayon on black paper

Chalk on black paper folded in four and then

B21 X25

unfolded

Musée national d’Art moderne — Centre

31.6 x 24

Georges Pompidou, Paris

Musée national d’Art moderne — Centre

Georges Pompidou, Paris

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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ARTISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Marion Adnams

Britain in the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington

(b. 1899 Derby, England —d. 1995 Derby, England)

Galleries in London. Subsequently she exhibited widely with the surre-

Although she wanted to study art, Marion Adnams instead studied

alists in Paris, New York and Tokyo, and her artistic practice ranged

modern languages in 1919 at University College, Nottingham encour-

from painting and drawing to objects, collage and frottage. During

aged by her parents . Only in 1930 did she attend part-time life

1937 she spent time at the home of Dora Maar and Picasso in

classes at Derby School of Art whilst teaching modern languages full-

Mougins, along with Paul and Nusch Eluard, Lee Miller and Roland

time at a grammar school. As a Derby artist, her career developed in

Penrose. Her friendship with Paul Nash fostered her interest in nature

this context and she became Head of Art in the 1950s at the Derby

and its objects. World War II disrupted her artistic activity; she began

Diocesan College of Education. Her work was influenced by her draw-

to paint again in 1946. Later she exhibited internationally and by the

ing tutor at the School of Art, the surrealist painter Alfred Bladen, and

1960s was producing Tachist paintings with surrealist elements.

she started to exhibit in London in 1939; her influences extend to Magritte, Paul Nash and Dali. She later returned to live in her parents’ house where she died in 1995.

Lola Alvarez Bravo

(b. 1907 Lagos de Moreno, Mexico — d. 1993 Mexico City) Dolores (Lola) Martinez Vianda became one of Mexico’s first profesEileen Agar

sional women photographers. She moved to Mexico City as a very

(b. 1899 Buenos Aires —d. 1991 London)

young child and, orphaned at the age of eight, was raised by relatives.

Eileen Agar’s artworks range from painting, collage and experiments

She married the Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo in

with automatic techniques to photography and objects, perhaps her

1925. The couple worked closely together and made the acquain-

most famous work being Ange! of Anarchy (1936-40). In 1906 her

tance of artists such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Lola Alvarez

family moved to England and in 1924, against the wishes of her par-

Bravo’s photography was influenced by Edward Weston and Tina

ents, she began to study art with Leon Underwood. From 1925 to

Modotti. Her photographs cover a wide range of subjects, from docu-

1926, she attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and later,

mentary images of the everyday in Mexico to portraits of leaders and

from 1928 to 1930 she lived in Paris, where she met Paul Eluard. She

artists, as well as experiments with photomontage. Although not

joined the Surrealist Group in England in 1933, was one of the co-

associated with surrealism per se, surrealist elements occur through-

signatories of the group’s inaugural declaration, and collaborated on

out her career. Her intimate portraits of Frida Kahlo and Maria

the International Surrealist Bulletin and on the London Bulletin. In

Izquierdo resonate strangely with those artists’ surrealistically influ-

1936 she was the only professional female painter to represent

enced works. Her first one-woman exhibition was held at the Palace

of Fine Arts in Mexico City in 1944 which was followed by numerous

orated on a number of issues of the surrealist review, Medium, pub-

group and solo exhibitions. She founded her own art gallery which

lished during the 1950s. However, she produced a small but signifi-

ran from 1951 to 1958 and which hosted the only Frida Kahlo exhibi-

cant ceuvre of intriguing surrealist objects, using everyday found

tion in Mexico during Kahlo’s lifetime. She taught photography at the

objects and collages, and collaborated on a number of exquisite

Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City and was honoured with a

corpses and other artworks with Breton and other surrealists. She was

major retrospective in the capital in 1992. A full archive of her work is

also a photographer and her pictures of Breton were gathered

located at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of

together and published in a volume by Les Editions au Fil de l’Encre

Arizona, Tucson.

(Paris) in 1993.

Rachel Baes

Emmy Bridgwater

b. 1912 Ixelles, Belgium — d. 1983 Bruges, Belgium) As the daughter of the painter Emile Baes, Rachel Baes had an early introduction to painting. At the start she was influenced by Flemish

b. 1906 Birmingham, England — d. 1999 Solihull, England) Bridgwater was the daughter of a chartered accountant and a ethodist. She had an early interest in painting and drawing and

expressionism and exhibited for the first time in 1929 at the Salon des

studied from 1922 to 1925 under Bernard Fleetwood-Walker at the

ndépendants

Birmingham School of Art. A visit to the 1936 International Surrealist

in Paris. She fell deeply in love with one of the main fig-

ures of Flemish nationalism, Joris Van Severen, and his death in 1940

Exhibition in London marked her turn to surrealism: she started to

eft her heartbroken. Her paintings are strongly focused on childhood

explore psychoanalytic ideas and to experiment with automatic

dramas, exploring them from a specifically female perspective. They

techniques. She became a member of and important link between

offer analyses of childhood as the cradle of women’s oppressions. In

the London and Birmingham Surrealist Groups.

1945 she met Paul Eluard — who wrote the preface to her first exhibi-

During the 1930s and 1940s she produced mostly paintings and

tion catalogue in Paris — and turned to surrealism. Magritte’s painting

pen-and-ink drawings. She continued her studies in 1936 when she

Shéhérazade (1947) is a portrait of Baes. In 1961 she moved to

visited the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London for a year and

Bruges (the town whose decorative buildings often appear in her

started to exhibit in London and Birmingham. She had a close friend-

paintings) and retired from public life. Subsequent exhibitions

ship with Edith Rimmington and a brief affair with Toni del Renzio.

included an exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles in

Bridgwater published widely in surrealist journals and reviews includ-

1965 and her final exhibition in 1976 at the Galerie Isy Brachot in

ing Arson:An Ardent Review and Free Unions. She held her first solo

Brussels. She published a biography on Van Severen in 1965, and was

exhibition at Jack Bilbo’s Modern Gallery in 1942. André Breton chose

buried alongside him at Abbeville.

her, together with five other English artists, to contribute to the

Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie Maeght in

Paris. Her duties of caring for her ageing mother and disabled sister Elisa Breton

suspended her artistic career from the late 1940s until the 1970s,

(b. 1906, Vina del Mar, Chile — d. 2000, Paris)

when she started to work again on collages.

Elisa Breton (née Bindoff) was born in Chile, to a well-to-do family of French origin. She married (Claro) and had a daughter who drowned, after which she tried to commit suicide. She met André Breton in 1943, marrying him in 1945, and

Claude Cahun (pseudonym of Lucy Schwob) b. 1894 Nantes, France — d. 1954 Jersey, Channel Islands)

together with Breton she travelled widely and was also influential in

Born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob in Nantes, she was the niece of

the publication of Arcanum 17. Her artworks were and are rarely

writer Marcel Schwob who was admired by the surrealists, and great

exhibited. Her paintings are hardly known and her writings are few,

niece of the Orientalist David Leon Cahun. From 1912, at the age of

but her 1949 conversation with Breton and Benjamin Péret on the

eighteen, Cahun began making photographic self-portraits which

painter Riopelle was included in Breton’s Surrealism and Painting and

radically explored identity as a fluid concept. It should be noted,

some of her comments and responses were included in publications

however, that her significant photographic ceuvre stretches well

such as Le Surréalisme, méme, no. 5 (1959). Elisa Breton also collab-

beyond this genre. In the late 1910s she adopted the pseudonym

Claude Cahun, intentionally adopting a gender-ambiguous name,

Ithell Colquhoun

after previously using the names Claude Courlis and Daniel Douglas.

(b. 1906 Shillong, Assam — d. 1988 Cornwall, England)

She settled with her life-long partner and stepsister Suzanne Mal-

Ithell Colquhoun was largely a self-taught artist. She grew up in

herbe (who adopted the pseudonym Marcel Moore) in Paris during

India and England and was heavily influenced by alchemy, Kabbalah

the early 1920s and collaborated with her on writings, sculptures,

and a magical society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden

photomontages and collages. In 1937 the couple moved to Jersey

Dawn. She was first introduced to surrealism in 1931 when she

and lived there until Cahun’s death.

visited Paris with her fellow students from the Slade. Salvador Dali’s

From 1914 Cahun published in a variety of periodicals including Le

art and his theories of ‘paranoic phantoms’ in particular captivated

Mercure de France. Her thinly disguised autobiography, illustrated

her, becoming the basis for her 1934 series of exotic plant studies.

with photomontages, was published in 1930. In 1933 she began to

In 1939 she took part in the Living Art in England exhibition, met

collaborate with the surrealist

Breton in Paris, and joined the English surrealist group, contributing

group. During the war, she and Moore

were active in the Resistance. In 1944 they were arrested and sen-

a number of articles to the London Bulletin. However, her allegiance

tenced to death by the Nazis, a fate which they only narrowly

with the group was short-lived: she disliked the dictates and schisms

escaped, but which also damaged Cahun’s subsequent health.

and was expelled from the London Surrealist Group for not giving her unconditional support to E.L.T. Mesens in 1940. Her work is marked by parodies of male-dominated surrealist obsessions with

Leonora Carrington

sexuality and eroticism. In the 1940s her work demonstrated a vari-

(b. 1917 Clayton Green, England)

ety of experiments with surrealist techniques such as decalcomania,

Carrington’s artistic oeuvre includes writing as well as painting.

fumage and frottage and with automatism, which she discusses in

She came from a wealthy family and studied painting in Amedée

her essay ‘The Mantic Stain’ (Enquiry [1949]}). Significantly,

Ozenfant’s London academy in her teens. Her turn to surrealism

Colquhoun was anti-oedipal and interested in different concepts of

was in 1936, already being familiar with the movement via Herbert

hybridity, and her use of the occult is often political, rather than

Read’s anthology Surrealism when she visited the 1936 International

esoteric. She was also an author, playwright and poet. She lived

Surrealist Exhibition in London.

most of her later life in Cornwall.

In 1937, aged only twenty, she met Max Ernst and settled with him in Saint-Martin-d’Ardeche, in France. In 1940, she was interned in a

psychiatric ward, her breakdown understandable not least as a

Nusch Eluard

response to Ernst’s detention in a camp for foreigners. This period is

(b. 1906 Muhihausen, Germany — d. 1946 Paris)

portrayed in her book En bas [Down Below (1945).

Nusch Eluard was born Maria Benz. She worked in the 1930s as a

Carrington was very active in the exiled Paris Surrealist Group in New York in 1941-42 and moved to Mexico in 1942 where, although

model for sentimental postcards and as a walk-on at the Grand

Guignol in Paris when she met the surrealist poet, Paul Eluard, whom

there was no organised Surrealist group, she was in close contact with

she married in 1934. She was associated with the surrealists during

Benjamin Péret (who returned to Paris after the war), Remedios Varo

the 1930s and collaborated in a number of group activities such as

and Luis Bunuel. After living in New York and then in Chicago in the

the game of exquisite corpse. She produced a series of photomon-

1980s, contributing to activities of the Chicago Surrealist Group, she

tages between 1934 and 1936. She was the subject of Paul Eluard’s

returned to Mexico in 1992. Her writings and plays include La Dame

Facile collection of poems which were illustrated by Man Ray’s nude

ovale [The Oval Lady] (1939), a collection of her stories illustrated by

photographs of her, and of a number of Picasso’s cubist portraits and

Max Ernst, her novel The Stone Door (written in the 1940s but only

sketches. She was also a model for Lee Miller and Dora Maar. During

published in 1976), and plays such as A Flannel Night-Shirt (1947).

World War Il she and her husband were active members of the French Resistance. She died unexpectedly in 1946 from a stroke. Her collages were published in 1978 by Editions Nadada, New York.

Josette Exandier

Léonor Fini

(b. 1944 Orléanais, France — d. 2008 Paris)

(b. 1908 Buenos Aires — d. 1996 Paris)

Josette Exandier was born in May 1944 and spent her childhood ina

Léonor Fini was the daughter of an Italian mother and an Argentinean

small village where her parents were school teachers. Having gradu-

father whom she never knew. She was raised in Trieste from the age

ated from the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Appliqués in Paris, and from

of two, and was strongly interested in Renaissance and Mannerist

the sculpture department of the Beaux-Arts, she became an art

paintings, as well as the Pre-Raphaelites, Aubrey Beardsley, Gustav

teacher. She taught throughout her life in different schools within the

Klimt and the German and Flemish Romantics. As an artist, she

Paris region. In the 1970s she became acquainted, through her partner Roger

remained largely self-taught. She first exhibited at the age of seventeen in a group exhibition in Trieste, and was invited in 1927 to Milan

Renaud, with surrealist circles. During this period she began com-

to execute her first portrait commission. While there she made, the

posing her first collages, using different kinds of material that she

acquaintance of the painters Achille Funi, Carlo Carra and Arturo Tosi.

liked to gather without any pre-planned purpose, soon developing

She moved to Paris in 1931 where she made friends with a number of

the habit of enshrining these collages in boxes. She gave a few exhi-

surrealists such as Georges Bataille, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Eluard,

bitions, mostly amongst friends, and took part in a number of oth-

Max Ernst, René

ers, inspired by surrealism or organised in its name. Overall she did

not being a memberof the group, she took part in a number of surre-

Magritte, Salvador Dali and Victor Brauner. Despite

not really aim at publicising her works, being content to show them

alist exhibitions.

only within a close circle of relatives. Josette Exandier worked in a

paintings of personalities such as Jean Genet, Anna Magnani and

The focus of her artworks shifted from early portrait

very solitary way. She showed a predilection for materials that had

Jacques Audiberti to surrealist scenarios. Theatricality always played a

been rejected, objects that everyday life had pushed aside into the

significant part in her paintings and was complemented by her set

common graves of uselessness, worthlessness or oblivion: animal

and costume designs for opera, ballet, theatre and films. She also

remains (bones, skulls, teeth, empty shells, feathers), fragments of

worked for Elsa Schiaparelli, designing the bottle for the perfume

dead plants, pebbles that nobody notices, broken tools, disused

Shocking. She held her first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in

implements, dismembered toys, bits of scrap and many other

New York in 1939. During the war years she lived in Monte Carlo and

things. The humbleness, the abandoned condition and the appar-

Rome, moving back to Paris in 1946. She illustrated many works by

ent degradation of these materials, for Josette Exandier, evoked

authors and poets such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and

signs of death and demise. She died on 29 May 2008.

Shakespeare as well as texts by her contemporaries, such as Pauline

Réage’s erotic novel, L Histoire d’O [The Story of O]. In the 1970s Fini wrote three novels: Rogomelec, Moumour, Contes pour enfants velu and L’Oneiropompe. A number of international retrospective exhibi-

tions in Belgium (1965), Japan (1972) and France (1981) were dedicated to her.

Jane Graverol

in 1933. Her ceuvre contains a wide range of portrait drawings and

(b. 1905 Ixelles, Belgium — d. 1984 Fontainebleau, France)

paintings of surrealists and other historical personalities, such as

The daughter of the painter and symbolist illustrator Alexandre

Arthur Rimbaud. After the war she returned to her focus on stage

Graverol, Jane Graverol attended courses by the symbolist/monu-

design for choreography, but also continued painting. She exhibited

mental painters Constant Montald and Jean Delville at the Académie

widely and a retrospective exhibition of her work was held in 1977 at

de Brussels. She held her first solo exhibition in 1927. She met

the Centre Culture! Thibaud de Champagne, Troyes.

Magritte in 1949 and was invited by him to exhibit the following year at the gallery Lou Cosyn in Brussels. She subsequently became an integral part of the group whose aim was to distance itself from

Frida Kahlo

Breton’s increasing tendency to mysticism. This is perhaps most

(b. 1907 Coyoacan, Mexico — d. 1954 Coyoacan, Mexico)

explicitly depicted in Graverol’s sober group portrait of the surrealists

Kahlo’s parents were of German, Indian and Spanish descent. Datings

entitled Goutte d’eau [Drop of Water (1964).

of her birth in 1910 emerge out of Kahlo’s claims that she was born at

During the organisation of a Magritte exhibition in 1953 she made

the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. In fact she was born in

the acquaintance of Marcel Marién, who became her partner of ten

1907. Kahlo contracted polio at the age of six. In 1925 she was seri-

years and who, like Magritte and Paul Nouge, became a major influ-

ously injured in a bus accident, where her spinal column was broken

ence on her art. She experimented and worked in a variety of media

and an iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her uterus. The acci-

ranging from oils and pastels to gouache and collage. She was a co-

dent, together with other traumatic events such as miscarriages and

founder of two significant surrealist publications; in 1952, together

subsequent operations, are a recurring image in her oeuvre, which

with André Blavier, she founded the review Temps mélés, and in

also offers complex and political meditations (her affiliation was com-

1954 she founded, along with Marién and Nougé, the avant-garde

munist) on identity and nationhood.

review Les Lévres nues (which emerged out of an important confer-

The accident left her in pain and disabled throughout her life and

ence on the surrealist icon Majakovskij, organised by Graverol and

led to many subsequent operations. But while convalescing, she

Marién). She subsequently also became director of the avant-garde

taught herself to paint. She married the Mexican artist Diego Rivera in

publishing house Les Léevres nues. In the 1960s, she made the

1929. André Breton discovered her work in 1938 and wrote the intro-

acquaintance of André Breton, and later Marcel Duchamp in New

duction to her first exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in

York. Even though she subsequently moved to France, she stayed in

1939, describing her as ‘surrealist’, but Kahlo actually never saw her-

close contact with the Belgian surrealist artists and exhibited in Bel-

self in such terms. Breton, together with Marcel Duchamp, also

gium every year.

arranged her first exhibition in Paris at the Pierre Colle Gallery. Kahlo’s first major exhibition in her home country was belatedly held in 1953, a year before her death, at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Mexico

Valentine Hugo

City. Kahlo died in 1954 after a variety of illnesses, including the gan-

(b. 1887 Boulogne-sur-Mer, France — d. 1968 Paris)

grene that necessitated the amputation of her right leg a year earlier.

Valentine Hugo was born Valentine Gross. She studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1907 and had a rich professional and social life. She collaborated with her husband Jean Hugo, whom she married in 1919 and who was the great-grandson of Victor Hugo, on designs for ballets including Cocteau’s Mariés de la Tour Eiffel

(1921). In 1928 she became acquainted with the surrealists, and was an active participant in the surrealist group between 1930 and 1936,

taking part in their collective games such as exquisite corpse. She was particularly close to René Crevel and Paul Eluard. She first exhibited with the surrealists at the Salon des Surindépendants in 1933. She

was a leading illustrator for texts by René Char and Paul Eluard and she illustrated Achim von Arnim’s Strange Tales (prefaced by Breton)

Greta Knutson

its closest. She was a close friend of Georges Bataille and joined the

(b. 1899 Stockholm —d. 1983 Paris)

short-lived anti-fascist revolutionary movement Contre-Attaque, as

Greta Knutson studied at the School of Fine Arts in Stockholm and

well as contributing through her disconcerting photographs to surre-

moved to Paris in the early 1920s. There she became a student of the

alist activities. Paul Eluard introduced her to Picasso: she became his

artist André Lhote. In 1924 she met the artist Tristan Tzara, whom she

muse and model, but also produced important documentary evi-

married a year later (they divorced in 1939). Like Tzara, Knutson

dence on him, for example by photographing the stages in the pro-

adopted surrealism in the 1930s, the decade in which she was

duction of Guernica. She had her first photography exhibition at the

actively engaged in surrealist games. She eventually broke with surre-

Galerie de Beaune in Paris in 1937 and her first solo exhibition of

alism to pursue her interest in phenomenology and specifically in the

painting at the galleries of Jean Bucher (1943) and Pierre Loeb (1945).

philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Her paintings

After the split with Picasso around 1944 she withdrew from public life,

were in the post-cubist abstract tradition and she also became known

but began exhibiting her paintings again during the 1950s, renounc-

as an art critic. Knutson was a prolific writer, producing an ceuvre of

ing her earlier associations with the surrealist movement.

novellas, prose and poetry and played a key-role in translating Swedish literary works into French. Her own poetry was never col-

lected into a single volume during her lifetime.

Emila Medkova

(b. 1928 Usti nad Orlici, Czechoslovakia — d. 1985 Prague) Emila Medkova was born Emila Tlaskalova. Her mother was a seam-

Jacqueline Lamba

stress and her father was a printer, and, during World War Il, a photo-

(b. 1910 Paris — d. 1993 La Rochecorbon, France)

grapher. From 1942 onwards, she trained in photography under Josef

Jacqueline Lamba studied decorative arts in Paris. She became André

Ehm at the School of Graphic Arts in Prague and took part during this

Breton’s second wife in 1934 and many of his poems of this period

period in the artist group Jantar. In the late 1940s Medkova produced

focus on her. She was mainly a painter, but also produced photo-

her Shadowplay cycle of photographs which explore disturbing

graphs (her plates were published in the first issue of the journal Du

resemblances between objects and bodies.

Cinéma in 1928). She also produced objects and collages, and was

Medkovd met the painter Mikulas’ Medek at the School of Graphic

represented in a number of surrealist publications such as Trajectoire

Arts in 1942. Their artistic productions are significantly informed by

du réve [Trajectory of the Dream], VVWV, and other publications. She

each other, and consisted of numerous and fruitful collaborations

separated from Breton in 1943 and married the American sculptor

until Medek’s death in 1974. In 1951 the pair married. The same year

David Hare. She held her first solo exhibition at the Norlyst Gallery in

they also joined the revived activities of the Czech Surrealist Group

New York in 1944 and also exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of

around the writer, artist and designer Karel Teige. From 1974 until her

Modern Art in 1946. After the International Surrealist Exhibition in

death she was an integral part of the surrealist group in Czechoslova-

Paris in 1947, her art distanced itself from surrealism.

kia. Medkova’s post-war photographs are documentary and yet surrealist; their reality reveals the absurdity of the political status quo. Her photography ranges from early arrangements of ‘phantom-objects’

Dora Maar

and scenes to her later works which explore the uncanny in the every-

(b. 1907 Tours, France — d. 1997, Paris)

day, often seeking out anthropomorphic features. Her photography

Dora Maar was born Henriette Theodora Markovitch into a Jewish

often draws on and is influenced by literary and painterly traditions,

family; her mother was French and her father Croatian, and Maar

including figures such as the artists Toyen, Enrico Baj and Arcimboldo

grew up in Argentina. She studied painting in Paris and visited the

and the fictional hero of Kafka’s Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa.

Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, Académy de Passy and Académie Julien, as well as studying with André Lhote in 1925. During this period she modelled for a number of photographers, including Man Ray. She had a photography studio in Neuilly from 1931 to 1934, working on reportages and publicity material, and gave up painting in the mid1930s, in the period when her association with the surrealists was at

Lee Miller

Déjeuner en fourrure (1936). Her first solo exhibition was at the

(b. 1907 Poughkeepsie, New York — d. 1977 Chiddingly, England)

Galerie Schulthess in Basel in 1933. Her first exhibition with the surre-

Lee Miller's mother was a Canadian of Scottish and Irish descent and

alists was in the same year at the Salon des Surindépendants and she

her father was of German descent. Her father often used her as a

actively participated in surrealist meetings and exhibitions until 1937.

model for his amateur photography. Her discovery by the founder of

She returned to Basel in 1937 and entered a period of artistic crisis

Vogue magazine, Condé Nast, at the age of nineteen, launched her

which would last eighteen years. After the war she continued to

career as a model. For the following two years she was one of the

exhibit with the surrealists until 1966, albeit to a lesser extent. She

most sought-after models in New York. She was photographed by

contributed to surrealist exhibitions until 1960. Her first major retro-

Edward Steichen and others: her advert for Kotex,

spective was held at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1967. Since

a female sanitary product, caused a scandal in 1928. She studied at

then, a number of other retrospectives have offered significant

the Art Students League before moving to Paris in 1929 where she

insights into her ceuvre.

worked with and was the partner of Man Ray until 1932. Together they discovered solarisation. Her close circle of friends included Picasso, Paul Eluard and Jean Cocteau. In 1932 she returned to

Grace Pailthorpe

New York where she opened her own photo studio in 1932. Her only

(b. 1883 St Leonards-on-Sea, England —d. 1971 Hastings, England)

solo exhibition was held the following year at the Julien Levy Gallery.

Pailthorpe studied medicine at Cambridge and became a surgeon in

In 1934 she abandoned her studio, marrying Aziz Eloui Bey, a

Australia during World War |. She travelled the world, returning to

wealthy Egyptian businessman with whom she lived in Cairo. Becom-

England in 1922. There she began studying psychological medicine

ing bored with her marriage, she moved back to Paris in 1937 where

and published Studies in the Psychology of Delinquencyin 1932. This

she rejoined the surrealist circle and met the surrealist painter Roland

publication was followed by another study on What We Put in Prison

Penrose. They moved to England in 1939. Miller became Vogue's war

and in Preventive and Rescue Homes. Both publications caused a

correspondent, documenting the Blitz. She was accredited into the

scandal in the profession as they suggested that people could learn

US Army as a war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications from

from delinquents, children and ‘madmen’. In 1928 she founded the

1942, travelling, together with the photographer David E. Scherman,

first worldwide institute devoted to the scientific treatment of delin-

to France. She recorded the first use of napalm at the siege of Saint-

quency which was later named the Portman Clinic; its vice-presidents

Malo, the liberation of Paris, the battle for Alsace and the horrors of

included Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, C. G. Jung, H.G. Wells and Sigmund

Nazi concentration camps, making her oeuvre one of the most im-

Freud himself. In the 1930s Pailthorpe contributed to a number of

portant documentary accounts of World War Il and of the collapse of

surrealist exhibitions and participated in the 1936 International Surre-

the German Reich. She returned to England after the war and married

alist Exhibition in London, where her drawings attracted a lot of atten-

Roland Penrose after discovering that she was pregnant. The trau-

tion and were greatly admired by Breton. In 1935 she met the surreal-

matic impressions from the war, however, caused severe depression.

ist artist Reuben Mednikoff whom she married and with whom she

Her photography, as well as being art, is also a key documentary

researched into the psychology of automatism, which she saw as a

resource of surrealism.

truly liberating art form. She contributed to the London group’s events, published drawings in the surrealist review London Bulletin and published her article ‘The Scientific Aspect of Surrealism’ in 1939.

Meret Oppenheim

The couple left the group in 1939 to continue with their research on

(b. 1913 Berlin —d. 1985 Basel, Switzerland)

their own. Most of her work has disappeared.

Oppenheim was raised in Switzerland and South Germany. She

travelled at the age of eighteen to Paris and enrolled there at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere. The following year she was introduced by Alberto Giacometti and Hans Arp to the Parisian surrealists.

She earned a living from making costume jewellery. A feminist eroticism is a major element in most of her artistic production, which includes drawings, paintings, and objects such as the famous (Objet)

Mimi Parent

Edith Rimmington

(b. 1924 Montreal, Canada — d. 2005 Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland)

(b. 1902 Leicester, England —d. 1986 Bexhill-on-Sea, England)

Marie (Mimi) Parent was born the eighth of nine children of architect

Edith Rimmington married the English surrealist artist, Robert Baxter

Lucien Parent. She studied art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the

in the 1920s and moved in 1937 from Manchester to London. In 1939

studio of the non-conformist artist, Alfred Pellan, in Montreal from

she was introduced by Gordon Onslow-Ford to the London Surrealist

1942 to 1947. Her first solo exhibition was in 1947 at the Dominion

Group and E. L. T.

Gallery in Montreal. She met the artist Jean Benoit during her studies

attending most weekly meetings in the Barcelona Restaurant in Soho

Mesens. She became a key figure in the group,

and married him in 1948, moving to Paris permanently. Although she

and the Horseshoe Pub in Tottenham Court Road, and struck up a

was involved with surrealism earlier, she officially joined the surrealists

close friendship with Emmy Bridgwater (whose:main affiliation was

in Paris in 1959 and was a key figure in the organisation of the EROS

with the Birmingham group). She showed her works in major surreal-

(Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme) exhibition which was held

ist exhibitions, most notably at the International Surrealist Exhibition

in Paris from 15 December 1959 to 15 February 1960. For this exhibi-

at the Galerie Maeght in 1947. She practiced automatic writing and

tion she designed both the poster and the catalogue, which was pre-

drawing with Emmy Bridgwater and occasionally also with Ithell

sented as a green letter-box, and which is often erroneously attrib-

Colquhoun.

uted to Marcel Duchamp. A large part of her oeuvre consists of eerie

three-dimensional fairy-tale-like scenes arranged in boxes. She took

Although she painted little during World War Il, her production of automatic texts increased, producing pieces such as Time-table and

part in all subsequent major surrealist exhibitions in Milan (1960), Sao

Leucotomy. Her interested focused on photography from the 1950s

Paolo (1967) and Czechoslovakia (1968) and other surrealist events.

onwards. She contributed a large number of drawings and writings to

In 1966 she had a solo exhibition at the Maya gallery in Brussels. She

surrealist publications such as the London Bulletin, Arson, Fulcrum,

also illustrated texts by Guy Cabanel, Pierre Dhainaut and José Pierre.

Message from Nowhere and Free Unions.

Valentine Penrose

Kay Sage

(b. 1903 Mont-de-Marsan, France — d. 1979 Chiddingly, England)

(b. 1898 Albany, New York — d. 1963 Woodbury, Connecticut)

Valentine Penrose was born Valentine Boué. She grew up ina small

Katherine Linn Sage came from a wealthy family; her father was a

town in France and her father was an army officer. She studied draw-

New York senator. After her parents separated she moved abroad

ing at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1916 and got to know the poets

with her mother, a morphine addict. She studied art in America and

and painters of Montparnasse. While on holiday in Cassis in 1924 she

in

met the surrealist artist, Roland Penrose who had a studio there with

Rome. She lived in Rome as well as in Rapallo for the next ten years

Yanko Varda, and married him soon after. She modelled for Man Ray

with her husband whom she then divorced, devoting her time to

and appeared in Luis Bufuel’s L’Age d’or [The Golden Age] in 1930.

painting. She had her first solo exhibition at the Galeria del Milione in

She had a close friendship with the Belgian explorer, anarchist and spiritualist Alexandra David-Néel. Penrose was highly interested in

Mi

Milan, Italy and in 1925 married Prince Ranieri di San Faustino in

an in 1936. In 1937, she moved to Paris where she exhibited one

painting at the Salon des Surindépendants where she was discovered

Eastern philosophy, studied Sanskrit and lived for extended periods in

by the surrealists. The meeting with the surrealists transformed her

India. In 1936 she joined the workers’ militia in Spain, and she fought

abstractionist painting style significantly, without, however, her leav-

in the French Resistance during World War Il. She collaborated on a

ing it behind. During her stay in Paris, she met the surrealist artist

wide range of surrealist publications throughout her life, ranging

Yves Tanguy whom she married. They returned to America after the

from London Bulletin and VVVto Dyn and Free Unions. Paul Eluard

outbreak of World War Il and settled in Woodbury, Connecticut. Dur-

prefaced her first book of poems, Herbe a la lune [Grass on the

ing the war period, their home was often frequented by exiled surre-

Moon], published in 1935. Whilst Penrose is best known for her

alists from New York. She exhibited regularly, had a number of solo

poetry, she started making collages in the 1940s and published the

exhibitions, and also contributed to the international surrealist exhibi-

collage-novel Dons de féminins in 1951. She also published a study of

tions in New York in 1942 and in Paris in 1947. She wrote poetry in

the medieval vampiric countess Erzsebet Bathory entitled The Bloody

Italian, English and French, and prepared and prefaced her husband’s

Countess in 1962.

catalogue raisonné Yves Tanguy: ASummary of His Work (1963).

Failing eye-sight, illness and her husband’s death in 1955, led Sage to

Dorothea Tanning

shoot herself in 1963. Mordicus, her last volume of poems was pub-

(b. 1912 Galesburg, Illinois)

lished posthumously in 1963 and included drawings by Jean Dubuffet.

Dorothea Tanning was born to Swedish parents. She attended the Art Institute of Chicago in 1932. She moved to New York where a visit to the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, held in 1936 at the

Penny Slinger

Museum of Modern Art, significantly changed her painterly style. In

(b. 1947 Middlesex, London

1939 she travelled to Europe to meet the surrealist artists, but was

Penny Slinger studied at the Chelsea College of Art from 1966 to

deeply disappointed, as the surrealist circle was no longer present

1969. During her research on Max Ernst she met Roland Penrose who,

due to the outbreak of World War II. Returning to New York, she

together with Lee Miller, encouraged her work during the 1960s and

exhibited in 1942 in Peggy Guggenheim’s landmark exhibition of

1970s. She exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts the year

thirty-one women painters. It was only then that she met surrealist

she left college, and went on to exhibit ina number of exhibitions in

artists, including Max Ernst (at the time, Guggenheim’s husband)

London, Europe and New York. Slinger’s oeuvre spans a wide array

with whom she moved to Sedona, Arizona and whom she married

of media — her early work, including sculpture, objects and collages,

in 1946. The couple moved to Paris in 1955 where they stayed until

is most strongly connected to surrealism. In 1980 she moved to

Ernst’s death in 1976, after which Tanning returned to America. She

the West Indies where she lived until 1994. Her work of this period

contributed as both writer and painter to the surrealist publication

ocussed on Trinidad, Tortola and Anguilla. She co-authored, illus-

VVV and also took part in the 1947 International Surrealist Exhibition

trated and wrote a number of books such as 50% The Visible Woman

in Paris. She had numerous one-woman exhibitions from 1944, as

1971) and An Exorcism — A Photoromance (1977) which featured an

well as a number of retrospective exhibitions in Knokke-le-Zoute, Paris

introduction by Roland Penrose. She moved to America in the 1990s

and, most recently in 2000, in Philadelphia. Tanning is also the author

where she continues to work as an artist.

of two books, The Abyss, written in 1947 and self-published in 1977,

and an autobiography entitled Birthday, published in 1986. She lives in New York.

Eva Svankmajerova (b. 1940 Kostelec nad Cernymi lesy, Czechoslovakia — d. 2005 Prague)

Toyen

The art of Eva Svankmajerova (née Eva Dvordkova) ranges from paint-

(b. 1902 Prague — d. 1980 Paris)

ing and ceramics to poetry and prose (which regularly appeared in

Toyen is a gender-neutral pseudonym for Maria Cerminova. She

the surrealist review Analogon). However, she was also strongly

attended the School of Applied Arts in Prague and in 1922 met the

involved in film: as designer and animator she collaborated with her

Czech poet Jindrich Styrsky in Yugoslavia. Her artistic career began

husband, the director Jan Svankmajer. Her interest in different artistic

with her participation in the short-lived, radical Czech avant-garde

media extended to the production of Otesdnekin the early 1970s, an

group Devetsil which drew together constructivists, Dadaists and oth-

animated short film which she previously also produced as a child-

ers. From 1925 to 1929, she lived with Styrsky in Paris where they

ren’s book. Otesdnek is based on a folk tale, and elements of folk art

defined ‘poetic artificialism’ — an alternative to both abstraction and

are also strongly present in her other artistic production.

surrealism. She had her first exhibition there, together with Styrsky,

In 1958, she moved to Prague where she studied at the Prague School of Interior Design and later the Academy of Performing Arts in

in 1927. Although she already knew some of the surrealists, it was only later that she actively took part in surrealist group activities. In

the theatre department. From 1970 she took part in the surrealist

1928 Toyen and Styrsky moved back to Prague where she produced

group in Prague. Her early works often focused on artforms which

a series of erotic publications and was a founding member of the

were out of fashion, such as rebuses; later, feminist topics are strongly

Czech surrealist group. During the occupation Toyen went under-

present in her oeuvre.

ground. Her political opposition to Stalinism and fascism is strongly present in her cycles of drawings (such as Cache-toi guerre! (1944]) during this period. In 1947 she fled with Jindrich Heisler to Paris,

where she became a key figure in the surrealist movement.

Remedios Varo

Francesca Woodman

(b. 1908 Anglés, Spain —d. 1963 Mexico City)

(b. 1958 Denver, Colorado — d. 1981 New York)

Remedios Varo spent her childhood travelling with her father in

Francesca Woodman was the daughter of the ceramicist Betty Wood-

Spain and North Africa. Her father’s occupation as a hydraulic engi-

man and the painter George Woodman. She attended a public

neer stimulated her lifelong interest in mathematics, mechanics and

school in Boulder, Colorado between 1964 and 1971 and completed

locomotives. She attended convent schools and studied at the Aca-

her Second Grade in Florence (Italy) in 1965-66. She made her first

demia de San Fernando in Madrid. She moved to Barcelona in 1935,

haunting self-portrait at the age of thirteen in 1971. From 1972 to

exhibiting there with the ‘logicophobist’ group which was influenced

1974 she visited the private Abbot Academy and the Phillips Academy

by surrealism, and became close friends with the painter Esteban

in Andover, Massachusetts, and then completed high school in

Frances. In 1936 she met the French surrealist

Boulder, Colorado in 1974-75.

poet Benjamin Péret,

at the time a Trotskyist volunteer in the anarchist militia during the Spanish revolution. Together they moved to Paris in 1937 where she

At the beginning of 1975 she attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island. She not only focussed on

became active in the Paris Surrealist Group until 1942. Varo and

photography there, but also produced videos related to her photo-

Péret were forced to emigrate in 1942 to Mexico due to the Nazi

graphs. She studied in Rome between 1977 and 1978 in the course

occupation where they were key figures in the

of a RISD honours programme — a period in which she produced the

Mexican émigré surre-

alist Community which also included Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Wolf-

series “On Being an Angel” (1977-78). Woodman graduated from

gang Paalen and others. Peéret returned to Paris in 1947; Varo stayed

RISD in 1978 and moved to New York in 1979. Whilst trying unsuc-

in Mexico and married Walter Gruen. She began to focus strongly on

cessfully to break into fashion photography, she became an artist-in-

painting due to her friendship with Carrington. Varo also wrote a

residence at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough. Even though

manuscript entitled De Homo Rodans which was published posthu-

she used different cameras and film formats during her career, she

mously in 1970.

took most of her photographs with a Yashica camera given to her by

her father. Woodman’s photography is anchored in surrealism, being heavily influenced by Man Ray’s photographs and Breton’s writings. She created a number of artists’ books, however the only one pub-

lished during her lifetime was Some Disordered Interior Geometries

which was published shortly before her death. In late 1980 Woodman suffered depression, and in 1981 she committed suicide by jumping out of her New York apartment window.

CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Patricia Allmer is curator of Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and

Surrealism. She is Research Fellow in Art History at the Manchester

Comparative Literature, at the Graduate School of City University of

Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design (MIRIAD) at

New York. She is the author of many books on the relations between

Manchester Metropolitan University, and has published and pre-

literature and art, including The Surrealist Look:An Erotics of

sented widely on different aspects of surrealism and art theory. Her

Encounter (MIT Press, 1999), Dora Maar- With and Without Picasso

publications include co-edited special journal issues on ‘The Forgot-

(Thames and Hudson, 2000), Pablo Picasso (Critical Lives, Reaktion

ten Surrealists: Belgian Surrealism 1924-1981’

(Image and Narrative,

Books, 2005), Salvador Dali (Critical Lives, Reaktion Books, 2008), and

December 2005 http://www.imageandnarrative.be/surrealism/

other illustrated biographies of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and

surrealism.htm) and ‘Reproducing Art: Walter Benjamin‘s “Work

Henry James (all published by Overlook Duckworth). She is the author

of Art” Essay Reconsidered’ (/nterCulture, Summer 2007,

of Women of Bloomsbury (Routledge, 1990), of a memoir (To the

http://www.fsu.edu/~ proghum/interculture/homepage.html). She is

Boathouse, University of Alabama Press, 2004), and a memoir/cook-

co-editor of Collective Inventions: Surrealism in Belgium (Leuven Uni-

book Proveng¢al Cooking: Savoring the Simple Life in France (Pegasus

versity Press, 2007), European Nightmares: European Horror Cinema

Books, 2008). She has also published several works on and in transla-

Since 1945 (Wallflower Press, 2010), and is the author of René

tion, including Surprised in Translation (Chicago University Press,

Magritte: Beyond Painting (Manchester University Press, 2009).

2006), and is the editor of Surrealist Painters and Poets (MIT Press, 2001), Surrealist Love Poems (Tate Publishing, and the University of

Roger Cardinal has written widely on surrealism and the avant-

Chicago Press 2001), and Surrealism (Phaidon: Themes and Move-

garde, with such books as Surrealism: Permanent Revelation (with

ments, 2004).

Robert Stuart Short, 1970), Expressionism (1984), The Landscape Vision of Paul Nash (1989) and Henry Moore: In the Light of Greece

Georgiana M. M. Colvile is Professor Emeritus of Anglophone

(2000), along with essays on the writers Andre Breton, Joe Bousquet,

Studies at the University of Tours, France, and of Francophone Stud-

René Char and Tristan Tzara, and on the artists Hans Bellmer, Alberto

ies, Comparative Literature and Film at the University of Colorado,

Giacometti, André Masson, Kurt Schwitters, Wols and Unica ZUrn. He

Boulder. Her research field covers francophone and anglophone

is also an international authority on Art Brut, which he introduced to

avant-garde literatures, plastic arts and film, with emphasis on

an English audience with Outsider Art (1972).

women’s work. Her latest books and many of her numerous articles

concern women surrealists. These include the proceedings of a Cerisy Conference, with Katharine Conley: La femme s‘entéte (1998);

an anthology: Scandaleusement d‘elles (1999); editions of Valentine Penrose‘s writings (2001) and Simone Kahn Breton‘s (2005).

Katharine Conley is Professor of French and Comparative Literature

Donna Roberts completed a PhD at the University of Essex on the

at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Robert Desnos, Surreal-

subject of the Grand Jeu. She has worked in numerous institutions in

ism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life (2003) and Automatic

the UK, including the AHRC Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism

Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism (1996) and co-

and its Legacies at the University of Essex and Tate, the Universities of

editor of volumes on women surrealists, Desnos, and surrealism and

Nottingham and Leicester and Saint Martin‘s Central School of Art

its Others. She is also the author of articles on surrealist writers and

and Design. Her current research interests include Czech surrealism,

artists in books, journals, and exhibition catalogues. Her current proj-

surrealism and natural history, and the writings of Roger Caillois. She

ect focuses on surrealist ghostliness throughout the twentieth cen-

curated the exhibition Communicating Vessels: Jan Svankmajer and

tury.

Eva Svankmajerova (University Gallery, University of Essex, 2007) and is currently editing an anthology on Czech surrealism in collaboration

Alyce Mahon js Senior Lecturer in History of Art, and a Fellow of Trinity College, at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Surre-

alism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968 (2005) and Eroticism and Art (2005), and has been involved in numerous exhibitions on Surrealism. Her essays include, ‘Displaying the Body: Surrealism’s Geography

of Pleasure’ in Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2007), ‘The Sadean Imagination: Pierre Klossowski and the “Vicious Circle”’ in Pierre Klossowski (Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2006), and ‘Staging Desire’ in Surrealism: Desire Unbound (Tate Modern,

2001).

with the Czech Surrealist Group.

INDEX

Numbers in italics refer to illustrations

Ades, Dawn 13 Adnams, Marion 86-87

Agar, Eileen 55, 67, 68, 88-94, 217 Angel of Anarchy (1936-40) 26, 43, 88 Ladybird (1936) 67-68, 93 Rocks at Ploumanach, Brittany (1936) 20, 36, 37, 42, 66, 92 Albert-Biro, Pierre 29

Alberti, Leon Battista Della Pittura (1435) 19 Alvarez Bravo, Lola 65-66, 95-99

Cuarto de Frida |Frida’s room] (1954) 18, 95 Apollinaire, Guillaume Alcools (1913) 61 Aragon, Louis 13, 36, 37, 56

Brdecka, Jif A Miller Lived by the River

(with Eva Svankmajerova) (1971) 80, 80

Grisis of the Object, The (1936) 57 Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) 76

Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930) 12

Caws, Mary Ann 12, 15, 16 Chadwick, Whitney 24, 69

Breton, André12, 31, 46, 49, 51, 52,57, 64, 71, 74, 76, 102, 216, 221, 222, 223, 224

Amour fou, L’ [Mad Love] (1937) 31, 50 Cadavre exquis [Exquisite Corpse| (with Jacqueline Lamba and Yves Tanguy)

(1938) 47, 2715

Nadja (1928) 51,61

Sunflower (1923) 50

Breton, Elisa 102-03 Untitled (n.d.) 67, 103 Bridgwater, Emmy 64, 65, 704-05 Leda and the Swan (c.1950) 26, 26, 70-71,

Brooks, Romaine

Bacon, Francis 52

Bryson, Norman 55

Baes, Rachel 21, 100-07

Burke, Carolyn 68

105

Transplanted (1947) 17

Self-portrait (1923) 55

Banting, John 217

Bard, Joseph 26, 68 Baudelaire, Charles 40, 71, 72

Bazin, Germain 32 Bellmer, Hans 62

Poupée (1934-35) 62 Untitled (1958) 61, 62 Benoit, Jean 25, 61 Bey, Aziz Eloui 68

Blacklock, William Kay Young Woman Peeling Apples, A (c.1655) 22 Bloom, Harold 26 Boetti, Anna 278, 219, 220

Bona (Bona Tibertelli de Pisis) 65 Boucher, Frangois 26

WISE

As They Rode along the Edge (1941) 66 Debutante, The (1937-38) 65 Down Below (1943) 65 House ofFear, The (1938) 65 Oval Lady, The (1939) 65 Self-portrait(c.1937-38) 21, 65, 65, 115 Woman and Bird (c.1937) 65 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) 69

Le Paysan de Paris [Paris Peasant] (1926) 36 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 80 Arrieta, Agustin 60

La Polka [The Polka] (1946) 67, 67, 100 Baker, George 52

Carrington, Leonora 13, 49, 64, 65, 66, 72,

Chalupecky, Jindfich 76 Chénieux-Gendron, Jacqueline 49 Chirico, Giorgio de 44 Cixous, Helene 64, 72

Cocteau, Jean

Blood of aPoet, The (1930) 15 Colquhoun, Ithell 70, 778-721

Gorgon (1946) 66, 121 Scylla (1938) 718, 19, 20, 24, 40-41, 66, 778 Cotan, Juan Sanchez 59 Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon and

Cucumber (c. 1600) 59 Cahun, Claude 17, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 55, 56, 57, 62,65, 106-14

Disavowals: or Cancelled Confessions (1930) 17,56, 65

Feathers, bird, sword and drape (c. 1936) 67, 113

Jacqueline Lamba (1939) 31, 114 Le Mystere d’Adam [The Mystery of Adam] (1929) 28, 28, 29 Self-portrait (1927) 17, 29, 29, 107 Self-portrait(c.1928) 17, 30, 106

Untitled (Still Life on Rocks) (c. 1935) 54, 56, Gl

View over Rocks (n.d.) 38, 710 Caravaggio The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (c. 1601-02) 19

Da Costa, Antonio Pedro 277

Dali, Gala (Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova) 15, 32 Dali, Salvador 15, 26, 32, 69, 77, 80 Dante Alighieri 21 Deleuze, Gilles 19, 22 Desnos, Robert 31, 48, 52

If You Only Knew (1926) 47 Dryje, Frantisek 75, 76 Duchamp, Marcel 65 Effenberger, Vratislav 75, 76, 79 Variants, Constants and Dominants of

Surrealism (1966-67) 75, 81 Eluard, Nusch 32, 33, 44, 122, 222, 223, 224 Eluard, Paul 32, 44, 223, 224 Word, The (1926) 47

Ernst, Max 50, 65, 72 Exandier, Josette 61,62, 123-25 Caresse, La[The Caress] (1999) 61, 125

Divination, La [Divination] (1990) 61, 66, 124 Fini, Leonor 33,65, 726-137

Le Bout du monde, Le [The Ends of the Earth]

(1948) 41, 131

Ombrelle L’ [The Parasol] (1947) 41, 66, 128 Petit Sphinx hermite [Little Hermit Sphinx] (1948) 26, 66, 66, 129 Foucault, Michel 48, 51,53

Freud, Sigmund 57, 65 Das Unheimliche (1919) 55 Gogh, Vincent van Interior with Peasant Woman Sewing (1885) 22 Graverol, Jane 132-35

Derniers Plaisirs, Les [Last Pleasures] (1962) 22, 135

Ecole de la vanité, L’[The School of Vanity}

(1967) 25, 66, 132 Esprit saint, L’ [The Holy Spirit| (1965) 19, 79, 20, 42, 66, 134

Prison céleste, La [The Celestial Prison| (1963) 21, 43, 43,67, 133 Guggenheim, Peggy 13, 50 Hayworth-Booth, Mark 68 Heisler, Jindrich 76, 77, 78 Herrera, Hayden 59 Hirtum, Marianne van 65 Hitler, Adolf 33 Holbein, Hans

The Ambassadors (1533) 46 Hugo, Valentine 65, 66, 136-38, 221, 222,

223, 224, 225 Imrie, Malcolm 13 Jarry, Alfred

Ubu Roi (1895) 32

Kahlo, Frida 13, 55, 58, 59, 60, 62, 65, 66, 139-145

Autorretrato con Pelo Corto [Self-portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) 24, 25 Diego and Frida 1929-1944 (I) (1944) 18, 66, 139 Me and My Parrots (1941) 59 Naturaleza muerta con sandias [Still Life with Watermelons] (1953) 24, 58, 59, 143 Self-portrait with Bonito (1941) 59 Still Life (Ibelong to Samuel Fastlicht) (1951) 59, 141

Still Life with Parrot and Flag (1951) 24, 59, 67, 140

Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 37 Lilar, Suzanne

Journal de l'analogiste |The Analogist’s Diary (1954) 40 Lupo, Roberto 58, 278, 219, 220 Maar, Dora 15, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35,57, 146-50 Léonor Fini (1936) 33, 33,65, 148

Nusch Eluard (c. 1935) 32, 44, 148 Pére Ubu (1936) 32, 32, 146 Sans titre (Main-coquillage) {Untitled

(Hand and Shell)] (1934) 31, 32, 66, 147 Simulateur, Le [The Pretender] (1936) 32, 149 Maes, Nicolaes

Young Woman Peeling Apples (c.1655) 20, 22 Magritte, René 15, 67, 69

Le Viol [The Rape] (1934) 16, 76 Mallarmé, Stephane 34

Le Pitre chatié |The Chastised Clown] (1864) 34-35 Man Ray 15, 16, 33, 42, 65 1929 56

56, 158

Solarized Portrait (1930) 42, 169 Valentine Penrose and Antony Penrose,

Farley Farm (1952) 66, 166 Miro, Joan 65 Mitrani, Nora 62 Mola, Pier Francesco 26

Monnerot, Jules La Poésie moderne et le sacré

[Modern Poetry and the Sacred (1945) 37, 42, 44 Moore, Marcel (Malherbe, Suzanne) 29, 30 Moreau, Gustave 26

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 51 Mutrie, Annie Feray 23

Mutrie, Martha Darley 23

Oppenheim, Meret 13, 42, 57,58, 62, 170-76, 218, 219, 220

(1938-66) 21, 27 55)

Shadows on Lee Miller’s Torso (1930) 15 Mansour, Joyce 62 Margueritte, Victor

La Gargonne (1921) 55 Marién, Marcel

De Sade a Lenin (1945) 62 Masson, André 15, 21

Mauss, Marcel 39 Medek, Mikulas 79 Imperialist Breakfast (Emila and Flies) (1953) 77,18 Medkova, Emila 39, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, Sooo}

Arcimboldo |(1978) 79, 152

Cap with Barometer (1949) 78, 155

Haarwasserfall [Cascade of Hair] (1949) 78, i

Eyes (1965) 39, 39, 77, 79, 154 Snowhead (1949) 79, 80

Untitled (Angel) (1948) 16, 42, 78, 153

Meskimmon, Marsha 16 Michaux, Henri 31

Michelangelo (di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni) 26 Miller, J. Hillis 17 Miller, Lee 15, 16, 17, 28, 33, 34, 35, 42, 53, 56,

68, 156-169 Cock Rock (The Native) (1939) 38, 38, 42, 68,

Eileen Agar and Golden Tooth Sculpture

Lear, Edward 69

Severed breast from radical surgery ina place setting (c.1929) 23, 25, 34,

Observatory Time, The Lovers (1923) 15 Rrose Sélavy (alias Marcel! Duchamp) (1921)

Knutson, Greta 222, 225 Koubek, Jif 82

Le Brun, Annie 61 Leonardo da Vinci 26

156

Nash, Paul

Kéfer, Pierre 32

Lamba, Jacqueline 31, 33,50, 275, 216

157

Self-portrait with Sphinxes (1940) 26, 33, 66,

Electricity (1931) 15 Indestructible Object (1923) 15 Lee Miller (Neck) (1930) 15 Mannequin with a Bird Cage over her Head

159 Dorothea Tanning, Sedona, Arizona (1946)

Keats, John 72

Revenge on Culture (1940) 16, 17, 34, 42,

50, 162

(1937) 66, 168 Nusch Eluard by the side of a car (1937) 44, 163 Portrait of Space (1937) 19, 34, 34, 48, 49, 52, 167

Outline (1949) 38 Naville, Pierre 13 Nezval, Vitézslav 74

Andenken an das Pelzfrtinstuck {Souvenir of Breakfast in Fur] (1970) 23, 42, Mh WE)

Objet, Le Déjeuner en fourrure, [Object (Breakfast in Fur)] (1936) 22, 23, CXC

oT

Einhornchen [Squirrel] (1969) 56, 58, 66, 172

Still Life (1934) 57 Paalen, Wolfgang 65 Pailthorpe, Grace 177 Parent, Mimi 60, 61,62, 66, 70, 7178-79

J’habite au choc [ILive in Shock] (1955) 60, 61

Léda et le cygne [Leda and the Swan] (1997) 26, 42, 42, 70-71, 178

Maitresse [Mistress] (1966) 25, 25, 61, 179 Paz, Octavio 72 Penrose, Antony 68

Penrose, Roland 56, 68, 217 Portrait of Lee Miller, ‘Which-be-Witch’,

Lee Miller with body cast, known as ‘Bewitches Witch’ (1942) 15, 15 Penrose, Valentine 180-83 Ariane (1934-42) 41, 41, 181

Fin de la Guerre, La [The End of the War] (1934-42) 66, 180 Les Fées |, Les[ The Fairies ||(1934-42) 26, 77, 72, 183 Péret, Benjamin 49, 56 Picabia, Francis 65 Picasso, Pablo 15, 31, 32, 33, 42,57, 65, 68 Plath, Sylvia

The Bell Jar 30 Pollock, Griselda 20, 21,55 Prassinos, Giséle 65

Raaberg, Gwen 13 Rahon, Alice 65

Ratton, Charles 29 Remy, Michel 69

Rimmington, Edith 184-87 Oneiroscopist, The (1947) 69, 67-68, 184 Relative Strength (1950) 67, 68, 185

Sisters of Anarchy (1940) 67, 186 Rivera, Diego 18 Roberts, Mary Louise 55 Robinson, Lillian S. 23 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von

Venus in Furs (1869) 57 Sade, Donatien Alphonse Francois,

marquis de 25 Sage, Kay 13, 188-92 Schwob, Marcel 29 Slinger, Penny 793-95 Read my Lips (1973) 16, 17, 195 Solarik, Bruno 81 Srp, Karel 76, 77, 78

Styrsky, Jindfich 74, 76, 78 Frog Man (1934) 78 Man with the Blinkers (1934) 78 Svankmajer, Jan 80, 82 Dimensions of Dialogue (1982) 83 Little Otik (2000) 80 Svankmajerova, Eva 74, 75, 76, 80, 81, 82, 196-97

Bed (1976) 22, 81, 197 Menstruation: A Lady’s Problem (1976) 81, 87

Miller Lived by the River, A (with Jifi Brdecka) (1971) 80, 80 Surrealist Personality Without a Face (1995) 81-82, 82, 196 Tamayo, Rufino 60

Tanguy, Jeanette 13 Tanguy, Yves 44, 77, 215, 216 Tanning, Dorothea 13, 50, 52, 53, 65, 66,

198-99 Blue Waltz, The (1954) 66 Eine kleine Nachtmusik (1943) 21, 39-40, DO-Di, ol ngs Tableau vivant (1954) 66 Teige, Karel 74, 75

The Shooting Gallery (1946) 75 Tentindo, Virginia 66 Toyen (Marie Cerminova) 66, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78,

80, 82, 200-01 Avant-printemps, L’ [Early Spring] (1945) 76, 76,77, 201 Hide War! (1944) 77 Myth ofLight, The (1946) 78, 78 Neither Wings nor Stones: Wings and Stones (1948) 74 Shooting Gallery, The (1939) 75, 77 Townsend, Chris 72 Tzara, Tristan 225

Ubac, Raoul 21 Unik, Madame 13

Unknown Cast of Lee Miller’s Torso (c. 1942) 14, 202 Sheila Legge as a Surrealist Phantom in Trafalgar Square, for the International Surrealist Exhibition (1936) 203 International Surrealist Exhibition (1936) 204 The First International Surrealist Exhibition, New Burlington Galleries, London, England (June 1936) 205 Varo, Remedios 49, 52, 53, 65, 67, 206-07

Insomnia (1947) 21, 40, 49-50, 49, 66, 207 Woodman, Francesca 51-52, 53, 62, 72,

208-14 From the three kinds of melon in four

kinds of light series (1975-78) 23-24, 62,213 House #3 (1976) 21, 40, 40, 51-52, 209

“On Being and Angel #1” (1977) 26, 43, 271 Untitled (1977-78) 21, 72, 212 Yeats, W.B. 70 Zurbaran, Francisco 59

Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633) 59 Zurn, Unica 62, 65

Mann im Jasmin, Der (1970) 65 Woman, Fish and Bird (1961) 66

PICTURE CREDITS All reasonable efforts have been made to obtain copyright permission for images reproduced in this book. If we have committed an oversight, we will be pleased to rectify itin a subsequent edition.

p. 2 Detail of Jane Graverol, La Prison céleste |The Celestial Prison], 1963. See pl. 48 p.9 Penny Slinger, /Hear What you Say, 1973. See pl. 110 pp.10-11 Detail of Nusch Eluard, Untitled (Nudes Dancing arounda Gold Chalice], c. 1936. See pl. 37 pp. 84-85 Detail of Dorothea Tanning, Eine kleine Nachtmusik, 1943, See pl, 114 p.226 Detail of Lee Miller, Se/f-portrait with Sphinxes, Vogue studio, 1940. See pl. 72 Figures 7 © Artist’s Estate. Courtesy Roland Penrose Estate, England 2009. All rights reserved 2© Roland Penrose Estate, England 2009. All rights reserved

3The Menil Collection, Houston Photograph courtesy of Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 4 © Penny Slinger/The Penrose Collection, England 5 Tate. Purchased 1977 © The Estate of Ithell Colquhoun, courtesy The National Trust, Bodmin 6 Private Collection, Dilbeek, Belgium © DACS 2009 7 Metropolitan Museum ofArt. Bequest of Benjamin Altman © 2009, The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence 8 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Man Ray Trust/

Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., 1943 © Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico D. F./DACS 2009 ©

Image: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala Florence 711 Collection MONY VIBESCU © Jean Benoit

12 The Sherwin Collection © Jeremy Jenkinson BSc CEng MIET BA (Hons.) 13 Fractional and promised gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art © Estate of Claude Cahun 14 Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections 15 Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections 16 Paris, Musee national d'Art moderne — Centre Georges Pompidou © ADAGP © Photo CNAC/MNAM, Dis. RMN/ ©OJacques Faujour 17 The Bluff Collection LP © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London

2009. 18 Paris, Musee National d’Art moderne — Centre Georges Pompidou © ADAGP © Photo CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN/ Jacques Faujour 19© Lee Miller Archives, England. All rights reserved. 20 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art © The Estate of Eileen Agar

21 © Lee Miller Archives, England. All rights reserved. 22 Estate of Emila Medkova © Eva Kosakova 23 Courtesy of George and Betty Woodman and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

24 © Artist’s Estate. All rights reserved. The Roland Penrose Collection 25 Collection MONY VIBESCU © Jean Benoit 26 Collection: Liana Zanfrisco, Italy. Photo: David Wilms,

ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009

Germany © DACS 2009

9The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York © DACS 2009 © Image: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala Florence 10 The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Gift of

27 Paris, Musée National d’art moderne — Centre Georges

Pompidou © ADAGP © Photo CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN/JeanClaude Planchet

28 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 — Breton/Lamba. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2009 — Tanguy 29The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art. The Israel Museum Jerusalem © VEGAP, Spain/ DACS 2009 Photo: © The Israel Museum Jerusalem 30 Tate. Purchased with assistance from The Art Fund and the American Fund for the Tate Gallery 1997 © ADAGP, Paris and DAGS, London 2009. 37 Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections 32 Private Collection © DACS 2009 33 Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City © Banco de Mexico, Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico D. F./DACS 2009 34 San Diego Museum of Art, Gift of Anne R. and Amy Putnam 35 Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec. Collection of M. Bruynoghe, Bruxelles Photo: MNBAQ, Denis Legendre © Jean Benoit 36 Ubu Gallery, New York © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009.

37 Courtesy of George and Betty Woodman and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York 38 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Pierre and MariaGaetana Matisse Collection, 2002 Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2009 39Tate. Lent by a private collector in memory of Rafael Martinez 2002 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 40Private collection, Ecaussinnes, Belgium © Artist’s Estate.

Photo © Alain Breyer 41 Private collection, courtesy of The Mayor Gallery, London © Artist’s Estate. All rights reserved 42 The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art, The Israel Museum Jerusalem © Estate of the artist. Photo: © The Israel Museum Jerusalem.

43 © Artist’s Estate. All rights Collection 44 Paris, Musée national d'Art Pompidou © ADAGP © Photo Droits reserves 45 Private Collection, Prague. reserved.

reserved. The Roland Penrose

59-60 Private collection, courtesy of Galeria Arvil © Banco

moderne — Centre Georges

de Mexico, Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico D.F./DACS 2009

CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN/

© Artist's Estate. All rights

46 Photo: Maderna Museet, Stockholm © ADAGP, Paris and

DAGS, London 2009. 47 Estate of Emila Medkova © Eva Kosakova

48 © 49.© 50 © 51 ©

Jan Jan Jan Jan

Svankmajer Svankmajer Svankmajer Svankmajer

Plates 1, 2Manchester City Galleries. © John Rooks. Photo. © Manchester City Galleries 3Tate. Presented by the Friends of Tate Gallery © The Estate of Eileen Agar 4 The Sherwin Collection © Whitford & Hughes, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library. © The Estate of Eileen Agar 5 © Leeds Museums and Galleries (City Art Gallery) U. K./ The Bridgeman Art Library. © The Estate of Eileen Agar 6 Private collection, courtesy The Mayor Gallery, London. © The Estate of Eileen Agar 7 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. © The Estate of Eileen Agar

8& Private collection, courtesy The Mayor Gallery, London. © The Estate of Eileen Agar 9Peter Lanigan O'Keefe. © The Estate of Eileen Agar 10-14 Courtesy of Galeria Juan Martin, property of Manuel Alvarez Bravo Martinez 15-16 Private collection, Ecaussinnes, Belgium Photos

© Alain Breyer 17 The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art. The Israel Museum Jerusalem © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009. Photo: © The Israel Museum Jerusalem 18 The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art. The Israel Museum Jerusalem © Estate of the artist. Photo: © The Israel Museum Jerusalem by Avshalom Avital 19-20 The Sherwin Collection © Jeremy Jenkinson BSc

CEng MIET BA (Hons.) 21-29 Courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Collections 30 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Pierre and MariaGaetana Matisse Collection, 2002 Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2009 31-32 Private collection, courtesy of Galeria Arvil © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2009 33 Tate. Purchased 1977 © The Estate of Ithell Colquhoun, courtesy The National Trust, Bodmin 34 The Sherwin Collection © The Estate of Ithell Colquhoun, courtesy The National Trust, Bodmin 35 Private collection, courtesy The Mayor Gallery, London © The Estate of Ithell Colquhoun, courtesy The National Trust, Bodmin 36 Private collection © The Estate of Ithell Colquhoun, courtesy The National Trust, Bodmin 37Private collection, courtesy The Mayor Gallery, London © Artist's Estate. All rights reserved 38 Courtesy Brann Renaud. Image: © Brann Renaud 39 Collection MONY VIBESCU © Brann Renaud 40 Collection MONY VIBESCU © Brann Renaud 41 James Birch © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 42-43 The Edward James Foundation Limited © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 44 Tate. Lent by a private collector in memory of Rafael Martinez 2002 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 45 Private collection, courtesy Galerie Minsky, Paris © DACS, London and ADAGP, Paris 2009 46 Private collection © DACS, London and ADAGP, Paris/ Scala Florence 2009 47R. Ortmans © DACS 2009 48 Collection: Liana Zanfrisco, Italy Photo: David Wilms, Germany © DACS 2009 49 Private collection, Dilbeek, Belgium © DACS 2009 Photo © Alain Breyer 50 Collection MONY VIBESCU © DACS 2009 57-53 Collection: Paul Conran © ADAGP, Paris and DAS, London 2009 54 Private collection © Banco de Mexico, Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico D. F./DACS 2009 55-57 Private collection, courtesy of Galeria Arvil © Banco de Mexico, Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico D.F./DACS 2009 58 Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City © Banco de Mexico,

Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico D. F./DACS 2009

61 The Bluff Collection LP © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 62 Musée national d’Art moderne — Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris © ADAGP ©Photo CNAC/MNAM, Dis. RMN/ © Jacques Faujour 63 Musée national d’Art moderne — Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris © ADAGP © Photo CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN/ © Jean-Claude Planchet 64 Musée national d’Art moderne — Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris © ADAGP © Photo CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN/ © Jacques Faujour 65 Collection of the Sack Photographic Trust of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art © ARS, NY/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 66 Promised gift of Paul Sack to the Sack Photographic Trust of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art © ARS,

135 Private collection © DACS 2009 136 Private collection © DACS 2009 137 Paris, Musée national d'Art moderne — Centre Georges Pompidou © Droits réservés © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London

2009 © Photo CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN/Philippe Migeat 138 Paris, Musée national d'Art moderne — Centre Georges Pompidou © Société des Gens de Lettres, Paris © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 © Droits réservés © Photo

CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN/Philippe Migeat

139 Tate. Purchased 2005 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London

2009. © The Artist's Estate. All rights reserved 140 Private collection, courtesy The Mayor Gallery, London © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 (Breton/Hugo) © The Artist’s Estate. All rights reserved 1417 Paris, Musée national d'Art moderne — Centre Georges

Pompidou © Société des Gens de Lettres, Paris © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 © Droits réservés © Photo

CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN/Philippe Migeat

NY/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009

67-71 Estate of Emila Medkova © Eva Kosakova 72-85 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2009, All rights reserved 86 Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz © DACS 2009 87-88 Private collection © DACS 2009 89 Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland © DACS 2009

90-91 Private collection © DACS 2009 92 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of David A. Kaplan, © DACS 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ProLitteris, Zurich 93 \mage: © Leeds Museums and Galleries (City Art Gallery) U.K. © Artist’s Estate. All rights reserved 94-95 Collection MONY VIBESCU © Jean Benoit 96-99© Artists Estate. All rights reserved. The Roland Penrose Collection 100 The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art The Israel Museum Jerusalem © Estate of the Artist. Photo: © The Israel Museum Jerusalem 101 Private collection, courtesy The Mayor Gallery, London © Artist's Estate. All rights reserved 102 The Sherwin Collection © Artist’s Estate. All rights reserved 103 Private collection, courtesy The Mayor Gallery, London

© Artist's Estate. All rights reserved 104 Albany Institute of History & Art, gift of the Estate of Kay Sage Tanguy © Artist's Estate. All rights reserved 105 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Bequest of Kay Sage Tanguy © Artist’s Estate. All rights reserved 106 The Museum of Modern Art, New York Purchased 1955

© Artist's Estate. All rights reserved. © Photo: The Museum of Modern Art/Scala Florence 107 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1955. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art © Artist’s Estate. All rights reserved 108 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase,

Mildred Anna Williams Collection © Artist's Estate. All rights reserved 109-117 The Penrose Collection, England © Penny Slinger 712-13© Jan Svankmajer 114Tate. Purchased with assistance from The Art Fund and the American Fund for the Tate Gallery 1997 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009

115Tate. Purchased 2003 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009

116 Private collection, courtesy The Mayor Gallery, London © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 117Musée national d'Art moderne — Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris © ADAGP © Photo CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN/ Droits reserves

178 Courtesy The Roland Penrose Estate, England 2009, © The Artist's Estate. All rights reserved. The Penrose Collection 179Private collection, courtesy The Mayor Gallery, London 120 Private collection, courtesy The Mayor Gallery, London 721 Lee Miller Archives, England. © The Artist's Estate.

All rights reserved 122-123 The Vera and Arturo Schwartz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art The Israel Museum Jerusalem © DACS 2009 Photo: © The Israel Museum Jerusalem

124-130 Courtesy of George and Betty Woodman and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

131 Private collection, courtesy The Mayor Gallery © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 (Breton/Lamba) © ARS, NY and

DACS, London 2009 (Tanguy) 132 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2009 (Breton/Lamba) © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2009 (Tanquy) 133 The Sherwin Collection, © The Estate of Eileen Agar © The Artist's Estate. All rights reserved 134 Private collection © DACS 2009

EXHIBITION PROJECT TEAM Guest Curator Dr Patricia Allmer

Project Manager Fiona Corridan Principal Manager, Exhibitions Tim Wilcox Registrars Jenny McKellar Phillippa Wood

Audience Development and Communications Kim Gowland Jenny Davies Martin Grimes

Learning Kate Day Joanne Davies Alex Thorp

Exhibition Design Pauline Minsky Eleanor Winder Conservation Claire Grundy Linda Matthews Sarah Rainbow Verity Rowe Chris Russell

Fundraising Val Young Chris Whitfield Leila Aitken Exhibition Installation and Technical Allan Rawcliffe and the Collections and Display Technicians Images and Copyright Clare Gannaway Kate Jesson Gillian Michaels

Security and Invigilation Catriona Morgan and the Visitor Services team Retail Marcus Chase

Exhibitions Volunteer Lyndsay Cooper

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See a

Angels of Anarchy \s the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey yet of

the women who contributed so much to the SU eclist movement Stars such as Lee Miller, Meret Oppenheim and Frida Kahlo are joined by a

younger generation of women artists including Francesca Woodman, Josette Exandier and Penny Slinger. Through painting, photography, sculpture, print-making relale| film these artists demonstrate the ongoing power of the female surrealist vision.

ISBN 978-3-7913-4365-5

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