Reviews

Penrose and John Golding, eds, Picasso in Retrospect, London, 1980,

49–75. Women Artists and the
6 See Simon Shaw-Miller, ‘Instruments of desire: Musical morphology
in Picasso’s cubism’, in Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Surrealist Movement in the
Cage, New Haven and London, 2002, 89–120.
7 Quoted after Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought,
Chicago, IL, 1991, 365.
United States and Mexico
8 See Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism, Music, Literature and the
Other Arts, London and Chicago, IL, 2000.
Vanja V. Malloy
9 See Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, London,
1873, reprinted London, 1928, especially the essay ‘The School of
Giorgione’, 128–49.
10 See Dick Higgins, ‘Intermedia’, Something Else Newsletter, 1, 1966. In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of
11 See, for example: Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound Women Artists in Mexico and the United States,
in the Arts, Cambridge, MA, 1999; Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise,
Perspectives on Sound Art, New York and London, 2006; Michael Bull and
edited by Ilene Susan Fort, Tere Arcq and Terri Geis,
Les Back, eds, The Audio Culture Reader, London, 2003; Caleb Kelly, ed., Munich, London and New York: Del Monico Books-
Sound: Documents of Contemporary Art, London and Cambridge, MA, 2011; Prestel and the Los Angeles County Museum of
and Jonathan Sterne, ed., The Sound Studies Reader, London and New York,
2012. Art in association with Museo de Arte Moderno,
Mexico City, 2012, 256 pp., 250 col. illus., £40.00

This exhibition and catalogue are very important

for scholars of surrealism, given their extension of
the debate that has taken place since the 1980s on
the role of women in the movement. Although the
surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s, along with their
art and writing, were viewed as largely misogynistic
by academics such as Rudolph Kuenzli and Hal Foster,
more recent perspectives by Penelope Rosemont and
others have argued for the significant roles played by
actual women (and not just the image of ‘woman’) in
surrealism, which were formative in shaping its theory
and iconography.1
The exhibition contributed to this inquiry by
resituating it in America, where surrealism was well
known from the 1930s and where it landed for the
duration of the Second World War, from which point
surrealist activity intensified in North America. Its
themed rooms (‘Alice in Wonderland’, ‘Identity-
Portraiture’, ‘The Creative Woman’, Romance and
Domesticity’, and so on) focused around lesser-known
artists such as Gertrude Abercrombie, Sylvia Fein,
Maria Izquierdo, Helen Lundeberg, and Rosa Rolanda
as much as artists typically placed in the surrealist
context: Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Alice Rahon, Dorothea
Tanning, and Remedios Varo. The outcome of giving
so much wall space to what were thought to be fringe
figures is startling. Although none of their work can
compete with Kahlo’s massive and majestic canvas
shown here, The Two Fridas (1939, plate 1), the quality of
the work is very high and in the case of Lundeberg,
Rolanda, Fein and others, it is not indebted to any
of their better-known, canonical male colleagues.
The show was tightly knit and organized in a semi-

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Due to copyright reasons this image is not

available in the online version.

1 Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939. Oil on canvas, 5 8½ × 5 8½. The exhibition catalogue, edited by Ilene Susan
Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arte, Instituto de Bellas Artes.
© 2012, Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums
Fort, Tere Arcq and Terri Geis, represents the most
Trust, Mexico, D.F./DACS. Photo: Schalkwijk/Art Resource, New significant art-historical investigation of women
York.
surrealists in the United States and Mexico yet. It opens
labyrinthine way that used heavy rope reminiscent of with a thoughtful prologue from Whitney Chadwick,
the twine used by Marcel Duchamp for the ‘First Papers the author of the seminal 1985 book Women Artists and
of Surrealism’ exhibition held in New York in 1942. the Surrealist Movement.2 Chadwick explores here how the
Duchamp’s intention was to sow confusion; the idea surrealist movement was a liberating force for women
at LACMA was to steer visitors by roping off the gaps artists, providing an escape from restraining social
between the grey partitions on which the paintings expectations. The contribution of leading scholars such
hung, though it was not an easy exhibit to navigate so as Chadwick sets a highly original and academic tone
was not far from realizing accidentally what Duchamp for this catalogue. The eight multi-authored essays
achieved on purpose. that make up the core of this book are meticulously

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researched, diverse in focus and when taken together found surrealism more accessible to them in America,
give a comprehensive discussion and revision of where they were usually distanced from Breton’s male-
women surrealists in North America. No detail has dominated surrealist group. Critically, there was also
been overlooked as the catalogue also benefits from financial support for women surrealists in America
a gallery of high quality colour illustrations and through the patronage of Peggy Guggenheim and Betty
an appendix of artist biographies accompanied by Parson in New York and Antonio Souza, Carolina Amor
photographic portraits. and Inés Amor in Mexico City.
It is important to note that there were two earlier The art that these women created is distinctly
exhibition catalogues on women surrealists in America. different from the artwork produced by their male
These are the 2003 Women Surrealists in Mexico published counterparts in Europe, especially when considering
in Japanese, and the 2009 catalogue Angels of Anarchy.3 the treatment of the female body. While male
These were comprehensive but left out key women surrealists often depicted women in their art, the
artists working in the United States, so In Wonderland is female form usually took on the role of muse, femme-
therefore the first exhibition catalogue to undertake enfant, or sexual object. Although women surrealists
an extensive discussion of surrealist women working also implemented the female form in their artwork and
in the United States and Mexico. The reason behind often used it as a method to access the unconscious,
this geographic focus is substantial. During the Great portraiture became a dominant subject as a method
Depression and the Second World War, women in the of self-discovery in which women explored the
United States and Mexico gained more independence relationship between the female body and female
and opportunities than their peers in Europe. The identity.
United States and Mexico provided women with access While the catalogue makes it evident that the
to professional art education and established new United States and Mexico gave women surrealists
roles for middle-class women in the workforce. Many many advantages, it also demonstrates that these artists
European women who emigrated during the war still had to function in a patriarchal society. In the
United States, a large portion of their artwork reflects
the conflicting and sometimes confining multiple
roles that female artist grappled with such as that of
wife, mother and independent artist. For instance,
the catalogue’s inclusion of Tanning’s Family Portrait
(1954, plate 2) illustrates the disparity of power in
the family dynamic through the implementation of
scale. The figure of the husband/father is dramatically
Due to copyright enlarged and appears looming over that of the wife
and the diminutive cook. Meanwhile, Kay Sage’s I Have
reasons this image is No Shadow (1940) demonstrates the loss of self that can
accompany this type of family dynamic, alluding to
not available in the the well-documented relationship Sage had with her
domineering husband Yves Tanguy. Her unsupportive
online version. marriage led to her loss of independence, and even
more severely, the loss of individual identity.
While Ilene Susan Fort’s essay ‘In the Land of
Reinvention: The United States’ focuses exclusively
on the social constraints of female artists in the
United States, Tere Arcq’s ‘In the Land of Convulsive
Beauty: Mexico’ examines the conditions of women
surrealists in Mexico. Through the juxtaposition
of these two essays, the catalogue underscores the
2 Dorothea Tanning, Family Portrait, 1954. Oil on canvas, 91 ×
76.5 cm. Paris: Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges similar social conditions that these women grappled
Pompidou. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2012. Photo: with, establishing a strong thematic link between
CNAC/MNAN/Dist. Réunion des musées nationaux/Art
Resource, New York. their artworks. Featured in the catalogue is Leonora

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Carrington’s Green Tea (1942) painted in Mexico and history, marking it as a movement that brought artistic
depicting a woman standing inside a circle, her liberation for women in America.
body confined as if it were in a straitjacket. Here
Carrington alludes to her well-known experience Notes
at the psychiatric hospital in Santander, Spain.4 1 Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg, eds, Surrealism
More generally, her work references the practice of and Women, Cambridge, MA, 1991; Hal Foster, ‘L’Amour faux’, Art in
America, 74: 1, January 1986, 116–28; Penelope Rosemont, ed., Surrealist
hospitalizing rebellious women in psychiatric clinics as Women: An International Anthology, Austin, TX, 1998.
a means of social control. However Carrington, along 2 Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, London,
1985, 67.
with other surrealists in Mexico, gradually stopped 3 Massayo Nonaka, Raquel Tibol, and Olivier Debroise, Women Surrealists
painting images of confinement and suppression in in Mexico/Furida karo to sono jidai, Tokyo, 2003; Patricia Allmer, ed., Angels
of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism, Munich and New York, 2009.
place of portraits of infallible women with unworldly 4 See Leonora Carrington, ‘Down Below’, VVV, 1: 4, February 1944,
powers. The mystical creatures of Mesoamerica and republished in Leonora Carrington, Down Below, Chicago, 1983.
the cults of ancient antiquity inspired these newly
empowered portraits, as both sources ascribed great
powers to women. The inclusion of Carrington’s The
Guardian of the Eggs (1947) is one such example. This
mystical work depicts a woman who has transformed
into a powerful giantess tasked with defending all of
creation, symbolized by the egg she guards. Another
work that is shown in the catalogue is Varo’s Celestial
Pablum (1958), which depicts an ordinary woman in
an extraordinary role: our view inside her dwelling
reveals that she is transforming astral matter into food,
which she is shown feeding to the moon. Despite
her unassuming appearance, this portrait shows her
as central to sustaining the cosmos. In both works,
the female subject is portrayed in the act of creating,
protecting or sustaining life, qualities closely affiliated
with motherhood.
The catalogue points out that ancient cults and
mythical creatures were not the only source of
empowerment for women surrealists in Mexico. They
harnessed the raw primal energy of animals, through
which they communicated a variety of qualities
ranging from unbridled sexuality to uncanny intuition.
In the combination of woman and animal, the avatar
image of the women is empowered by her animalistic
qualities. This technique became quite popular with
surrealists in Mexico. For instance, Kahlo painted
herself with the body of a deer, Carrington used the
form of a hyena or horse, and Varo often appears in her
artwork as a butterfly or owl. The range of forms that
the female subject takes on is remarkable and spans the
gamut from realistic portraits of suppressed women to
fantastically powerful female avatars and mystics. This
catalogue demonstrates that these diverse artworks are
united by a thirst for self-discovery and empowerment
that these surrealists shared. It calls our attention
towards rethinking the work of women surrealists
and in doing so it repositions surrealism in a new

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