Surrealism And Women

These sixteen illustrated essays present an important revision of surrealism by focusing on the works of women surrealists and their strategies to assert positions as creative subjects within a movement that regarded woman primarily as an object of masculine desire or fear.While the male surrealists attacked aspects of the bourgeois order, they reinforced the traditional patriarchal image of woman. Their emphasis on dreams, automatic writing, and the unconscious reveal some of the least inhibited masculine fantasies. The first resistance to the male surrealists' projection of the female figure arose in the writings and paintings of marginalized woman artists and writers associated with Surrealism. The essays in this collection explore the complexity of these women's works, which simultaneously employ and subvert the dominant discourse of male surrealists. Essays What Do Little Girls Dream Of: The Insurgent Writing of Gis�le Prassinos • Finding What You Are Not Looking For • From D�jeuner en fourrure to Caroline: Meret Oppenheim's Chronicle of Surrealism • Speaking with Forked Tongues: "Male" Discourse in "Female" Surrealism? • Androgyny: Interview with Meret Oppenheim • The Body Subversive: Corporeal Imagery in Carrington, Prassinos, and Mansour • Identity Crises: Joyce Mansour's Narratives • Joyce Mansour and Egyptian Mythology • In the Interim: The Constructivist Surrealism of Kay Sage • The Flight from Passion in Leonora Carrington's Literary Work • Beauty and/Is the Beast: Animal Symbology in the Work of Leonora Carrington, Remedio Varo, and Leonor Fini • Valentine, Andr�, Paul et les autres, or the Surrealization of Valentine Hugo • Refashioning the World to the Image of Female Desire: The Collages of Aube Ell�ou�t • Eileen Agar • Statement by Dorothea Tanning

Beginning in Paris in the 1920s, women poets, essayists, painters, and artists in other media have actively collaborated in defining and refining surrealism's basic project—achieving a higher, open, and dynamic consciousness, from which no aspect of the real or the imaginary is rejected. Indeed, few artistic or social movements can boast as many women forebears, founders, and participants—perhaps only feminism itself. Yet outside the movement, women's contributions to surrealism have been largely ignored or simply unknown. This anthology, the first of its kind in any language, displays the range and significance of women's contributions to surrealism. Letting surrealist women speak for themselves, Penelope Rosemont has assembled nearly three hundred texts by ninety-six women from twenty-eight countries. She opens the book with a succinct summary of surrealism's basic aims and principles, followed by a discussion of the place of gender in the movement's origins. She then organizes the book into historical periods ranging from the 1920s to the present, with introductions that describe trends in the movement during each period. Rosemont also prefaces each surrealist's work with a brief biographical statement.

This pioneering book stands as the most comprehensive treatment of the lives, ideas and art works of the remarkable group of women who were an essential part of the Surrealist movement. Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim and Dorothea Tanning, among many others, became an embodiment of their age as they struggled towards artistic maturity and their own 'liberation of the spirit' in the context of the Surrealist revolution. Their stories and their achievements are presented here against the background of the turbulent decades of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and the war that forced Surrealism into exile in New York and Mexico.

Contemporary feminist critics have often described Surrealism as a misogynist movement. In Automatic Woman, Katharine Conley addresses this issue, confirming some feminist allegations while qualifying and overturning others. Through insightfuløanalyses of works by a range of writers and artists, Conley develops a complex view of Surrealist portrayals of Woman. Conley begins with a discussion of the composite image of Woman developed by such early male Surrealists as Andrä Breton, Francis Picabia, and Paul Eluard. She labels that image ?Automatic Woman??a term that comprises views of Woman as provocative and revolutionary but also as a depersonalized object largely devoid of individuality and volition. This analysis largely confirms feminist critiques of Surrealism. The heart of the book, however, examines the writings of Leonora Carrington and Unica Z_rn, two women in the Surrealist movement whose works, Conley argues, anticipate much contemporary feminist art and theory. In concluding, Conley shows how Breton?s own views on women evolved in the course of his long career, arriving at last at a position far more congenial to contemporary feminists. Automatic Woman is distinguished by Katharine Conley?s judicious understanding of how women?and the image of Woman?figured in Surrealism. The book is an important contemporary account of a cultural movement that continues to fascinate, influence, and provoke us.

Published to accompany exhibition held at the MIT List Center, Cambridge, MA; 9/4 - 28/6 1998.

A fascinating examination of the ambitions and friendships of a talented group of midcentury women artists Farewell to the Muse documents what it meant to be young, ambitious, and female in the context of an avant-garde movement defined by celebrated men whose backgrounds were often quite different from those of their younger lovers and companions. Focusing on the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Whitney Chadwick charts five female friendships among the Surrealists to show how Surrealism, female friendship, and the experiences of war, loss, and trauma shaped individual women’s transitions from someone else’s muse to mature artists in their own right. Her vivid account includes the fascinating story of Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe in occupied Jersey, as well as the experiences of Lee Miller and Valentine Penrose at the front line. Chadwick draws on personal correspondence between women, including the extraordinary letters between Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini during the months following the arrest and imprisonment of Carrington’s lover Max Ernst and the letter Frida Kahlo shared with her friend and lover Jacqueline Lamba years after it was written in the late 1930s. This history brings a new perspective to the political context of Surrealism as well as fresh insights on the vital importance of female friendship to its progress.

Surrealist women’s writing: A critical exploration is the first sustained critical inquiry into the writing of women associated with surrealism. Featuring original essays by leading scholars of surrealism, the volume demonstrates the extent and the historical, linguistic, and culturally contextual breadth of this writing. It also highlights how the specifically surrealist poetics and politics of these writers’ work intersect with and contribute to contemporary debates on, for example, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, otherness, anthropocentrism, and the environment. Drawing on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, the essays in the volume focus on the writing of numerous women surrealists, many of whom have hitherto mainly been known for their visual rather than their literary production. These include Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Colette Peignot, Suzanne Césaire, Unica Zürn, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Rikki Ducornet.

"The female side of Surrealism: in the period from 1930 to the 1960s, women artists from all over the world were involved in the Surrealist movement and created a fantastic universe of images. Some 260 works of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and film serve to present the extraordinary and imaginative contributions of 36 international avant-garde women artists to one of the seminal art movements of modernism."--Page 4 de la couverture