Women Surrealists

Female Artists in the Surrealist Movement: Women in Touch with their Inner Witch

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Depictions of the Witch and the Witches’ Sabbath often took gruesome forms. They were usually drawn by men and included male fantasies of what these unknown beings were up to when nobody was looking.

Move forward a couple of centuries, and a number of women artists loosely falling under the category Surrealist, got in touch with the uncanny world of  the Dream and the Dark side of the Female psyche. They were armed with a new knowledge of the esoteric and the occult and they knew greater freedom and had more opportunities. Here are some of their most notable members.

To introduce:

Dorothea Tanning (25th August 1910 – 31st January 2012)

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A little Night music

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Birthday (1942)

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Palaestra (1947)

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The artist herself

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Leonor Fini (30th August 1907 – 18th January 1996)

“Had this been the 17^th century”, George Melly wrote in his obituary of her, “Leonor Fini would have been burnt as a witch”. The imagery in her work attests to this. She was not the most talented, but the imagination was fertile and often wandered in an erotic direction, having much to draw on, as her love-life had been varied and unusual. (Among other texts, she illustrated de Sade’s ‘Justine’!) Her ethnic background was of mixed Spanish, Italian, Argentinian, and Slavic blood, a formidable genetic cocktail. Her primary inspiration, as she once said, was the ‘Theatre of her own Mind’.

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Red Vision

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‘La Prison de Zigrifine’

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Moon Goddess

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The Double

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‘Sphinge’

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‘It is without doubt Azrael’

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The unsealed room

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Heliodora

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The Artist

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Ithell Colquhoun (9th October 1906 – 11th April 1988)

She was expelled from the English Surrealist Movement for her passionate interest in the Arcane and the Occult. She was artist, poet and novelist. In addition, she was a practicing magician. She did not compartmentalize because for her these activities were intimately related, different facets of her quest to comprehend nature and the myths and traditions of Cornwall where she spent most of her adult working life.

In pursuit of her Initiation, Ithell applied for membership of an offshoot of the Golden Dawn (but was turned down!), entered into Correspondence with Dion Fortune’s Society of Inner Light, and was a member of the New Isis Lodge of Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian O.T.O.  In addition, she was a member of W B Crow’s Order of the Keltic Cross, had an active involvement in Co-Masonry (at one time alongside Lady Frieda Harris), was associated with the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, and was ordained as a Priestess of the Fellowship of Isis.

As well as over 80 contributions to various Magical, New Age and Occult journals, Ithell was also a published poet, had written two psychogeographical accounts of travels in her beloved Cornwall and rural Ireland, an Alchemical Surrealist novel ‘The Goose of Hermogenes’, and a study of the life of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and his work with the Golden Dawn, ‘The Sword of Wisdom’

An excellent overview of her Life & Work, with many descriptions and detailed discussions of the whole range of her Writings, can be found here:

http://www.ithellcolquhoun.co.uk/

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Green figure with wings (water-colour, 1971)

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Scylla

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“Gouffres Amers” (1939)

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Nude and Orange Sky

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Alchemical Mandala

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The Artist

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Remedios Varo (16th December 1908 – 8th October 1963)

In some ways the most accomplished artist in that her themes richly encompass both the world of science, (her father was a hydraulic engineer, sparking a lifelong interest in maths and mechanical drawing) and the mythic and – in the best Surrealist  fashion – the strange. It is suggested she struggled to combine those two adversaries of old: the sacred and the profane. Be that as it may, they also produced a most productive creative tension in her work. Her idiom is sometimes reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch.

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Papilla Estelar (1958)

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“Creation of the Birds”

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Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst’s Office

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Fenomeno de Ingravidez (1963)

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Personaje (1961)

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Exploration of the Orinoco (1959)

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Ruptura

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Harmony

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The Lover Is …

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The Artist

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Valentine Hugo (16^th March 1887 – 1968)

Born Valentine Gross in Boulogne-sur-Mer, she studied painting in Paris, and in 1919 married the great-grandson of Victor Hugo.

She met the Surrealists around 1928 and actively participated in the Movement, taking part in many of the group experiments: numerous examples survive of the infamous Cadavre Exquis – or “Exquisite Corpse” – created with Breton, Dali & Gala, Eluard & Nusch, Tristan Tzara, et al., as a kind of Surrealist ‘Third Mind’ Party Game.

Successful as a Graphic Artist, Hugo illustrated the Works of Paul Eluard, as well as that Black Bible of Surrealism, ‘Les Chants de Maldoror’ by le Comte de Lautréamont (pen-name of Isidore Ducasse), and their beloved de Sade and Rimbaud.

She also created designs for ballet by her husband. French artist Jean Hugo (1894–1984), and for Jean Cocteau.

She died in Paris in 1968.

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The Surrealist Constellation (depicting Paul Éluard, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel and René Char)

Arthur Rimbaud – ‘Les Poètes de sept ans’ (illustration 1939)

Cadavre Exquis, with André Breton, Paul & Nusch Éluard (1934)

Illustration for de Sade (1947)

Paul Eluard – ‘Les Animaux et leurs hommes’ (illustration 1937)

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The Artist (portrait by Man Ray)

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Eileen Agar (1st December 1899 – 17th November 1991)

Left-to-Right: her art-object, ‘Angel of Anarchy’, (created 1936-40) which inspired the title of the 2009 definitive retrospective ‘Angels of Anarchy: Women and Surrealism’; ’The Autobiography of an Embryo’ (1933-4) –  She spoke of it in the context of her own childlessness, which she said was a deliberate choice. ”I was more interested in becoming a painter than in being a mother”;  a Self-Portrait from 1927, the year before she moved to Paris to study Art, met  Andre Breton and Paul Eluard, and joined the Surrealists.

“Nearly 23 years ago now, owing to my friendship with Geff Rushton (better known as ‘John Balance’) of Coil, I was invited to collaborate on material for what was intended to become a ‘Coil Book’: a kind of anthology of collected lyrics and manifestoes (back in those heady days, any of us remotely connected to the “Post-Industrial scene” who wanted to be taken seriously wrote ‘manifestoes’ not press releases!) – but also articles relating to the various obsessions and interests of Coil and their close friends & associates…

I remember accompanying Geff to visit and interview a charming old lady called Eileen Agar, who had been one of the few English artists to actually belong to the Surrealist group in Paris; when Salvador Dali died the BBC wheeled her out to explain who Dali was and why Surrealism was important, and she had just written a memoir called ‘A Look At My Life’. [ The photo below is from the cover of her book, which came out in 1988, and is pretty much how she looked when we went to see her. ] We spent a delightful afternoon with her, drinking tea and looking at old photos and paintings, while Geff tried to explain Acid House and Ecstasy to her (his current new enthusiasms at that time), and find out gossip about an alleged menage she had lived in with Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, and photographer Lee Miller… (I think!?!)

I remember she began by telling us that as a little girl she had travelled from Argentina to Britain accompanied by a cow and an orchestra, because her rich and fashionable mother believed that fresh milk and good music were essential to her well-being… ”

“I’ve enjoyed life, and it shows through” Agar said. “Like a transparent skirt, or something like that.”

It could almost be a caption to this famous photo of her dancing on a roof-top in a see-through dress, taken in 1937 when she and the Hungarian writer Joseph Bard (whom she would later marry), were on holiday with Paul & Nusch Eluard and Roland Penrose & Lee Miller at the Mougins home of Picasso & Dora Maar.

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Leonora Carrington (6th April 1917 – date of death varies)

English painter, sculptor and writer and one of the more colourful. From a childhood of “eccentricity… a combination of anti-social tendencies and certain supernatural proclivities”, she found little encouragement from her family to forge an artistic career, though her mother allowed her to study at Mrs. Penrose’s Academy of Art in Florence, introducing her to the rich Renaissance colourists. She hung out with Dali and Picasso, eloped with Max Ernst,  and escaped from a Spanish psychiatric hospital (at the age of 23, abroad and alone, separated from Ernst as they fled Nazi Occupied France, she’d suffered a mental breakdown).

In addition to her visual art, she wrote novels and short stories that are among some of the best Surrealist literature:‘The Hearing Trumpet’ and ‘The Seventh Horse and Other Tales’, as well as ‘The House of Fear’ and ‘Notes from Down There’ which are based on her own experiences – in particular the incarceration in a Madrid asylum.

After being “rescued by her nanny who arrived in a submarine”, she relocated to Mexico, where she lived out her days – at one point becoming mentor, and possibly lover, to the young Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Her rendition of some of the events in her life “should not be understood literally, but as magic realism – a response to her own mental state and events at the time. There is a sense of a hybrid world half recognizable, half fantasy…”

It could be a definition of Surrealism itself.

“I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.” - Leonora Carrington, 1983

read more here:http: //www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/art-obituaries/8539650/Leonora-Carrington.html

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Self-portrait, aka ‘Hyena’ (later used as the cover for her  ’The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below’)

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Aardvark

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Chair

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Boat with Monkey

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The Artist Young and Old

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Kay Sage (25th June 1898 – 8th January 1963)

A Surrealist with a difference. The settings of her paintings (which show the influence of Giorgio de Chirico, and were produced alongside those of her husband Yves Tanguy) are worlds irrevocably altered and stripped by human engineering and interference, leaving landscapes that are virtually emptied of colour, their desolation bathed in a strange cold inhuman light.

One painting shows a woman who sits waiting on the edge of jagged de-naturalized rocks and looks out over a barren plain from which all life seems to have vanished. She is disconnected from and has forgotten the Natural World she came from. She is waiting but can no longer remember what she’s waiting for…

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‘Le Passage’ 1956 (which was used as the original cover-art for Whitney Chadwick’s definitive study ‘Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement’ when it first came out in 1985)

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Dora Maar, Lee Miller and Méret Oppenheim, to name but three, each produced an image or images that have endured as iconic representations of the Surrealist movement. Here are a few examples:

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Dora Maar (22nd November 1907 – 16th July 1997)

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Lee Miller (23rd April 1907 – 21st July 1977)

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Méret Oppenheim (6th October 1913 — 15th November 1985)

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Surrealism as a whole continues to fascinate and inspire. After all, in its juxtaposition of the world of the Everyday and the world of Dream and the Imagination and the tensions between them, which the artist makes into art, it is the very stuff of Life itself…

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