Much has changed since the publication of my book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement in 1985. When I began the research for the book, women artists associated with the Surrealists were generally known, when they were known at all, as the companions, wives and lovers of better known male Surrealists. Little of their work was in public collections, and references to them in the literature of Surrealism were scattered and fragmentary. Frida Kahlo had not yet become an icon of feminine angst and pop culture; nor were Leonora Carrington's novels required reading in undergraduate literature classes.
Since 1985, we have witnessed an explosion of exhibitions, catalogues, books and scholarly conferences devoted to women's contributions to Surrealism. The role of women artists within the historical European avant-garde in general, and Surrealism in particular, remains a subject of scholarly and critical debate. Yet if the contradictions between Surrealism's liberationist goals and its reiteration of patriarchal ideology in the area of sexual politics-whether consciously or unconsciously enacted-remain problematic for many of us, Surrealism's significance for women artists since the 1930s seems to me undeniable today.
It is, for the most part, women artists who reoriented Surrealism's obsession with sexuality to an interrogation of femininity, and of the interplay between gender and sexuality; and who rewrote the Surrealist metaphor of violent disjunction into new narratives of visionary transformation. There is no question of the importance of Surrealism for a generation of pre-World War II artists that included Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, Toyen, and Remedios Varo (regardless of whether they identified themselves as "surrealists," or not), and a post-war generation that included Aube Ellouet, Bona de Mandiarges, and Erika Zurn, among others. Their contributions to the furthering of Surrealism's goals-including the liberation of consciousness from the polarities of western thought, and from rationalism and positivism, and the institution of a new poetics of transformation, erotic metamorphosis, ambiguity and accident-are everywhere evident in their works. In the end, they became perhaps the first female adherents of a twentieth-century vanguard movement to explore issues of gender as well as sexuality, and to contribute new narratives of self structured through visionary knowledge.
Most women artists who came into the Surrealist orbit after 1929 were doubly marginalized. They were neither, in most cases, French; nor had they been present during Surrealism's formative years. As a result, few women considered themselves "surrealists" in a doctrinaire sense, even as they participated in Surrealist activities and exhibited with the group. As their work increasingly circulates in public venues through museum and gallery exhibitions like the current show at Weinstein Gallery, the scope and diversity of their artistic practices becomes evident, the variety of their interactions with Surrealism more evident. Such is certainly the case with the group included in the current exhibition.
Leonor Fini never considered herself a Surrealist at all, though she maintained close personal relationships with several members of the group (including Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington) and included work in several important Surrealist exhibitions in the 1930s. Although she shared the Surrealist interest in dream, reverie, psychic transformation, and a poetics of suggestion and allusion, her work remains firmly rooted in the traditions of Symbolism, Metaphysics and Italian and German Romanticism. While her earliest figurative paintings reveal a debt to post-World War I classicism, by the 1930s she had evolved a highly personal and evocative symbolic figuration. This was combined with a powerful draughtsmanship in a series of complex and probing portraits. Over the next decades, she elaborated a rich and evocative, and often theatrical, visual universe in which women and animals served as carriers of powerful psychic forces. A series of lithographs, watercolors and pastels from the 1970s, with their focus on single female heads, recall novelist Victor Hugo's early watercolors in their poetic allusiveness, their deft interweaving of abstraction and representation, their veiled romanticism.
Fini's refusal to declare herself a Surrealist was shared by other women active in Paris, London and New York during the 1930s and 1940s. Leonora Carrington's introduction to the movement occurred when her mother gave her a copy of Herbert Read's Surrealism when she was a pupil at Amadée Ozenfant's academy in London in 1936. The book, with its cover illustration of Max Ernst's painting Two Children Menaced by a Nightingale, proved prophetic. Within a year she would flee London and her conservative upper class family with Ernst, whom she met on the occasion of his exhibition at the Mayor Gallery, and take up residence among the Surrealists. Merging the precise and technically proficient drawing that she had learned from Ozenfant with the Surrealist's cultivation of the dream, the unconscious and the irrational, she would go on to produce a long series of paintings and writings based on a belief in psychic and spiritual journeys and transformations.
Stella Snead, also an Ozenfant pupil with Carrington, neither ran off to Paris, exhibited with the Surrealists, nor formally joined the group. Nevertheless, Surrealism was very much in the air in London, where the first major international Surrealist exhibition opened in 1936, and Snead's paintings bear the unmistakable imprint of Surrealism's cultivation of the illogical juxtaposition of objects and its belief that the line between the real and the unreal, the dream and reality, the conscious and the unconscious, remains fluid.
The dispersion of the Surrealists during World War II, and particularly the arrival in New York of a group that included André Breton, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, and others, in 1940 and 1941, would have a significant impact on the development of post-war modernism in New York, and on a younger generation of American artists that included Dorothea Tanning and Kay Sage. By the 1950s, Tanning had transformed illusionistic Surrealism with its startling juxtapositions of unrelated objects into prismatic fields of shattered color and form. Her use of metallic hues and abstract form relate these paintings to Matta's psychological "inscapes" and Yves Tanguy's hallucinatory mental landscapes, but the density and explosive quality of her imagery renders them unlike anything else in post-war Surrealism.
The women artists who were drawn to Surrealism remain a diverse and highly individual group. Their contributions would take Surrealism in new directions after World War II, and their legacy remains visible in the work of younger generations of artists from Eva Hesse to Kiki Smith.
Whitney Chadwick
Westport Point, Massachusetts
Whitney Chadwick is Professor of Art History at San Francisco State University and lectures both nationally and internationally on women artists and Surrealism in general. She is the author of numerous books, including: Women Artists and The Surrealist Movement; Women, Art and Society; and Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation.
