Rewriting the Surrealist Narrative for Women
Words by Camila Hernandez
'Such is the belief in life, in the most precarious aspects of life, by which is meant real life, that in the end, belief is lost.'
These are the opening lines and decrees that framed André Breton's 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism. Shortly after Breton's pivotal application of Freudian thought and dream studies to the artistic and political modes of self-expression, the Manifesto was highly regarded by ambitious visual and lyrical artists on an international scale. The cerebral and irrational tenets of Surrealism found their ancestry in the whimsical disregard for tradition fostered by Dadaism a decade earlier. A key trope of the works produced at this time was the free-flowing control of the unconscious, which inherently fuelled the disorientating illogic of Max Ernst's collage work, Salvador Dali's psycho-sexual imagery, and Breton's automatic writing.
The line-up of the most prolific and well-known Surrealist artists was made up of a coterie of internal and external exiles. In this way, many creatives were war-torn and found they could exercise their political muscle within the climate of global disconnect on the Surrealist canvas — this was seen as a necessary jolt to the bourgeois world.
'Man,' Breton continues, 'that inveterate dreamer, more and more discontented day by day with his fate, orbits with difficulty around the objects he has been led to make use of...'
The first word of the above sentence, 'man,' brings to the foreground, several decades later, the overlooked blind-spot that has always plagued Surrealist works — that of gender politics. Of course, women have always existed in the Surrealist movement, but for the most part, as mystified and fetishised objects stitched next to masculine figures in Dali's optical puzzles, or as troubling, pornified faces with breasts for eyes as Magritte depicted them.
Woman with Head of Roses, Salvador Dali (1935)
'The Noble Mannequin is so perfect,' wrote the Surrealist René Crevel in 1934, 'she does not always bother to take her head, arms, and legs with her.' In other words, she was already an exquisite corpse.
Under Breton's eye, women were often cast as harpies, sorceresses, or sphinxes. Painters of Mexican descent such as Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, and Alice Rahon, and Remedios Varo adopted these guises to their advantage. Kahlo's work unveils the introspective truths of the female condition and motherhood, while Varo's worlds of magical hybrid creatures of locomotion.
La maja del tarot, Leonora Carrington (1965)
Far from the control of famed surrealists, a group of female European artists emigrated to Mexico and created a distinct, subversive and surprising world of their own. The use of symbolism related to the esoteric traditions in the work of many of these artists shows a precise cultural intellect and, in general, their work emblematizes maturity of thought and technical mastery, in addition to a continuing search for the true nature of their female identity.
On the brink of surrendering to the cult of machismo that still exists today in creative Latin American spheres, these artists strove to prove that, though they found themselves hindered by machismo on a personal level, it could be overcome on a professional, more transcendent one.
For instance, metamorphosis is a widely used theme in Mexican art, and it was, in turn, manipulated by female artists as a means to explore the nature of binary creation and transformation in its many forms: physical, psychological, and spiritual. As they veered away from the gendered agenda of male Surrealists, some of these artists employed a technique to mask gender itself, or, as Kahlo did, they chose to depict the male in just as a destructive light as the female.
The Call, Remedios Varo (1961)
Star Maker, Remedios Varo (1958)
For Varo, the woman is the alchemist, she is the only agent equipped to uncover and unite all things through mystical scientific discovery. In Carrington's art, she reveals the secret connections between spirit and matter, tangible and intangible, abstract and concrete. For Kahlo, neither the female nor the human more generally are not objects for mere aesthetic value, but beings of suffering, and subjects of her artwork.
What these artists demonstrated was that Surrealism is capable of hypnotizing without objectifying, of mirroring the marvelous without being silent and subservient. Though they felt they were restricted to painting the utopias they couldn't live, these women proved they were revolutionary in their own right, not just muses that made men’s canvases more interesting.
