A Major Exhibit of Female Surrealists Revels in Visual Fantasy
LOS ANGELES—For the longest time, Americans have viewed Surrealism as a form of dream-like painting. The exhibit here of female Surrealists, “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States,” confirms that common impression.
It also updates the public to the fact that while the 1920s founders of Surrealism were European men, there is a line of illustrious female Surrealists as well—and a good many in the Americas. Some had been U.S. painters and art students who caught the 1930s European trend, while others had been Europeans who, at the onset of war in France in 1940, began migrating here and to Mexico.
For Latin America, the most famous Surrealist painter was Frida Kahlo, a native of Mexico. Two of her paintings, one a self portrait with her former husband Diego Rivera (1931), and the other, Two Fridas (1939), are large and striking features of the exhibit. Other icons of female Surrealism—from Louise Bourgeois (sculptor) and Leonora Carrington (collagist and painter) to Lee Miller (photographer), Dorothea Tanning (painter), and Maya Deren (filmmaker)—are arrayed by themes across this expansive display at the Los Angeles County Museum.
The exhibit, put together in cooperation with Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, shows 175 work about 47 artists. It continues in Los Angeles until May 6, when it travels to Quebec. The exhibit’s allusion to Alice in Wonderland is quite apropos, since the very nature of Surrealist art is to represent images of fantastical worlds, dream states or nightmares, and a reality that can be very psychiatric in mood.
To evoke all of this, Surrealist visual arts had to use fairly traditional approaches to painting. Surprisingly, perhaps, the so-called movement began among poets. The term was coined in 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire. He was writing a pamphlet for an avant-garde play in Paris, titled Parade, and came up with the neologism “sur-realism” (beyond realism). He later produced his own “surrealist drama.”
As it turned out, a young poet follower of Apollinaire was Andre Breton, who later claimed to have co-invented the term. Either way, Breton founded the Surrealist movement as a literary event in 1924, drawing especially on his medical work in psychiatric wards and Freud’s new theories about dreams, sex, and the repressed unconscious. The visual side to this new interest in odd associations buried in the unconscious—and screaming to get out—came from outside France.
In Germany, the “Dada” painter Max Ernst was doing works that tended to mix human parts with machine parts (a kind of Dada specialty). Also, from Italy came Gorgio de Chirico, who brought to Paris his paintings of haunting public plazas of Milan with long shadows, lone figures, classical statues, and faceless mannequins (to become a kind of icon for Surrealism). As these visual influences converged, Breton held his first art show in Paris in 1921. It was actually Dada art, convened at Galerie Montaigne and debuting Ernst, who soon eclipsed Dada painter Francis Picabia as the Surrealist favorite.
In 1924, Breton issued his first Surrealist Manifesto. He also founded his publication, Surrealist Revolution, which connected art and Surrealism in a famous article, “Surrealism and Painting.” He knew that modern art was more influential than poetry, so he wanted to bring the visual arts under his Surrealism banner. The first official Surrealist art exhibit came in Paris in November 1925 at the Galerie Pierre Loeb. Breton even persuaded Picasso to submit a work or two.
Meanwhile, Surrealism developed a kind of subculture in Paris, dedicated to encounter groups discussing poetry, sex, and the unconscious. One day, the classically-trained Spanish painter Salvador Dalí arrived in Paris, too. Welcomed into the Breton circle, he began to out-paint and out-antic even Ernst, and eventually Breton banned him. Still, in December 1936, Dalí appeared on the cover of Time magazine as the superlative Surrealist. This coincided with the first big art show on the topic in the United States, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,” at the Museum of Modern Art. (Ever since, ordinary Americans have associated "Surrealism" with Dalí's hyper-realistic style).
In Paris, Breton and friends matched the New York event with the even larger “International Surrealist Exhibition,” which gathered a Who’s Who of the “usual suspects.” This was 1937, the year of Surrealism’s highpoint in Paris before the war, which shifted the story to the Americas. Over here, Dali became popular. So did Ernst and other Surreal-like painters such as the Spaniard Joan Miro. In fact, many of the American painters working on Depression-era federal art projects tried out Surrealism before moving on to pure abstraction, which led to Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s.
In the wake of this, the female Surrealists kept intact much of the literal, or figurative, painting style of early Surrealism. They created new images, drew on folk stories—as Kahlo did in her Mexican Surrealism—and retained the movement's interest in meticulously painted tableaus, picture-stories that were mysterious, moody, symbolic, and iconic. They also were filled with themes important to women.
All of this comes through at the “In Wonderland” exhibit. And that’s a good thing. Literary Surrealism and its subculture imploded, suffering from many of its worst features, such as narcissism, obfuscation, and even misogyny. What survives is the splendid visual products of an age and outlook. The Lady Surrealists—often working on their own, unrewarded and in obscurity—have helped preserve some of that important art legacy in the Americas.
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