WHITNEY CHADWICK, WOMEN IN THE SURREALIST MOVEMENT

par Éléonore Antzenberger

What witches are you, you women
(Freud, Letter to Martha Bernays)

Surrealism has long struggled between two visions of woman: one romantic, the other revolutionary; this is the first observation of this work that gives voice to those who, for several decades, had been deprived of it.

Yes, feminine surrealist art exists. Yes, its influence on the evolution of surrealism has been underestimated. Yes, even today, it is examined with skeptical condescension compared to that of their male counterparts. The latter, both companions and rivals, were perhaps paradoxically the first to envision this collaboration/cohabitation as competition. Indeed, few are those who encourage their companions' vocation: "Yves [Tanguy] never looks at the painting I'm working on, admits Kay Sage; naturally I'm more interested in his work than he is in mine" (p.98). More frequent are those who stifle, more or less consciously, their aspirations.

One cannot reproach these women, living in a climate of incessant creative feverishness, for having, they too, intellectual pretensions. But this beginning of the century, which still lives under the complacent aegis of the 19th century, is hardly favorable to this type of "insurrection": "women artists were already more or less conditioned to accept the correctness of surrealist views" (p.236), emphasizes Chadwick, insisting on women's impossibility of having access to secondary education, let alone artistic education. Man thus inherits the representation of a passive, submissive and dependent woman. Having its limits, contestation, man, even if surrealist, finds a certain (re)comfort in the perpetuation of this image. Surrealism opposes an absolute negative to this bourgeois vision. This system does not, however, exclude the model that preceded it. "Modernism" not being sufficient to break certain archetypes, the first image is not destroyed but cohabits with the new one. One must still wait for a surrealist movement well established on its foundations before homage is paid to women. In 1930, the first issue of Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution pays them justice, not as actresses, but as inspirers. And, if dedications to beloved women abound, no trace of a single homage to any feminine work in this issue. Would the Muses be mute?

The surrealist conception, insists Chadwick, finds balance in its own contradictions 1. Issue 9 of La Révolution Surréaliste (1927) inaugurated the "woman-child 2" who would dominate the movement's erotic imagery for several decades. Gisèle Prassinos, the youngest of the group, was for a time its emblem. The publication of her first book, at the age of fourteen, thus makes the expression of the woman-child coincide with the blossoming of her career. The woman-child, erotic angel/virginal witch, is the guarantor of a certain sexual ambiguity. The purity of her innocence is such that it sometimes borders on absolute perversion. Here is unquestionably the origin of her subversive force. It is at least from this angle that she is photographed on the cover of this same issue of La Révolution Surréaliste, made up like a vamp, dressed as a schoolgirl. Woman is politically subversive (p. 31) – this is why the surrealists remained fascinated by extreme cases (Violette Nozières, the Papon sisters, Germaine Berton) of this revolutionary ideal. If, according to the author, Marie-Berthe Aurrenche 3 was the first emanation of this image, it is Gala, the fierce muse, who consecrates the idea that woman is capable of exercising revolutionary action on the world (p. 16). This Visible Woman is a Gradiva 4, she who advances, mediator between interior and exterior realities. Gala was not an artist; Valentine Hugo incontestably was and she was one of the rare ones to integrate the surrealist orbit with a solidly established artist reputation.

It is in the thirties that woman acquires her ambivalence within the movement. Female artists increase the surrealist ranks at the same time as the conception of the child-woman is consolidated. The author attributes this growing presence to the success of the International Surrealist Exhibitions from 1936. In New York, Peggy Guggenheim organized in 1942 the first exhibition (31 women) totally dedicated to women. Henry Mac Bride commented on this event with humor 5: "[...] As everyone knows, there are many neurotic men in New York, but everyone also knows that there are even more neurotic women. It was obvious that women should excel in surrealism. This is what they do." The Parisian exhibition Surrealism in 1947 — which presents many of the women mentioned here — also sees the emergence of a new generation of women, including painter Marie Wilson and sculptor Isabelle Waldberg. Another reason for feminine evolution within the movement is world determinism. The war, which, among other things, forces exile, allows women to gain their independence. Besides New York, land of welcome for the Bretons, Mexico thus makes the artistic maturity of Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington coincide. London welcomes Eileen Agar and Rita Kernn-Larsen. Lee Miller, war correspondent for the American army, multiplies round trips between England and France.

Feminine power, insists Chadwick, is never alienating. It is spiritual guide, total incarnation of an ideology, not of a phantasmagoria. This woman, or rather this feminine absolute, has her own mythology that begins with Mélusine, who will take on the features of blonde Jacqueline Lamba, in the twenties and is enriched, from the following decade, by Gradiva.

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Like most of her contemporaries, Chadwick believes that this vision is immortalized in Nadja: this wandering soul ends, as everyone knows, her days in an asylum, a few months after her meeting with Breton. This end is not entirely displeasing to the surrealists who associate madness with the absolute manifestation of convulsive beauty. Beyond an intellectual deficiency, hysteria represents for them a supreme means of expression 6 characteristic of the woman-child, whose clairvoyant ingenuity is an open door to this madness. To Nadja is imputed the dark privilege of being the holder of a "state" that man is careful not to assume. The author therefore does not fail to emphasize that woman's role is, once again, to satisfy a masculine conception.

Without necessarily reaching such extremes, a certain number of surrealist women fell into serious depressions, like Dora Maar, Meret Oppenheim or Leonora Carrington. All or almost all are artist's women before being women artists — this is the case, for example, of Remedios Varo whom we know above all as Benjamin Péret's wife. In other words, all are potential muses. This persistent image of visionary woman-child, which weakens some, is also a brake on their artistic fulfillment. This common vulnerability has at least the merit of reinforcing feminine friendships, notably between Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini.

Perhaps by force of circumstances, these women are individualists who care little about their group membership: "I was never a surrealist, declares Leonora Carrington 7, I lived with Max Ernst 8" (p.56); Valentine Hugo's reasons for refusing to exhibit in the company of surrealists are thus very clear: "[...] because, she says, I wanted to feel free to do and love what I wanted" (p.226). The awareness of the quality of their work is, on the other hand, very relative: "I painted for myself, says Carrington again, and I didn't think that anyone could want either to exhibit me or to buy my works" (p.194). Some, like Kay Sage 9, resign themselves to living in the shadow of their husband-mentor. Others, like Jacqueline Lamba, concerned with carrying out their personal work, choose divorce. Rare are those who, like Frida Kahlo, manage to combine a fruitful artistic life with total devotion to their companion.

Reconciling the life of an artist with that of an artist's woman is a daily challenge. Stifled by an ideal they did not ask for and which they do not necessarily share 10, many of these women experience difficulties in fulfilling themselves in their intellectual life. Permanently confronted with themselves, their identity flourishes in a significant genre, the self-portrait (that of Rita Kernn-Larsen is entitled Know Thyself); this is the case of Frida Kahlo who never considered herself a surrealist, but as a realist artist who painted her own life. Lee Miller, who cultivates the same independence of spirit, does not long remain Man Ray's "pupil." She quickly becomes his partner and even his emulator, although, the author seems to deplore, her image, immortalized by Man Ray's photographs, is better known than her work itself (p.39).

Conjugal life is therefore capital here in that it structures artistic identity. Eroticism governs, to a very large extent, surrealist ethics in that it is a means of transforming man's consciousness where, recalls Chadwick, politics has failed (p. 36). Nothing surprising therefore that sensuality is so intimately linked to the revolutionary principle. Witness issue 11 of La Révolution surréaliste (1928) which publishes, despite Breton's fierce puritanism, the results of their "Survey on sexuality"; a few women are occasionally invited so that their whispers are sometimes distinct from this virile tumult. With their customary verve, the surrealists defend the absolute necessity of (re)conciling love and eroticism. This language is therefore powerfully masculine. The conclusions as well. This discourse nevertheless concedes to woman the freedom to adhere to it or reject it. Ultimate possibility: create their own language. It is here, notes Chadwick, that an unexpected paradox intervenes because these women, cultivating eccentricity (Jacqueline Lamba's "à la Fontange" hairstyle), the taste for provocation 11 and not repugnant to showing themselves naked in public, are of extreme reserve in the expression of sexuality. The vision of the latter is suggested, even diverted with more or less restraint 12. The only ones to whom Chadwick concedes a surrealist sexual identity are Toyen and Leonor Fini, the rare ones who always deliberately stayed away from the movement. The only ones also to have displayed their homo/bisexuality. The only ones, in short, to truly assume who they were and to say so. This representation being able to be only extreme, they refer to D. A. F. de Sade; Toyen illustrates Justine, Leonor Fini, Juliette. This recourse to Sadian imagery could almost sound like gratuitous provocation so much it is one of the strongest there is. This is not the case. Humor is also an effective screen, notably with Ithel Colqhoune, who turns the surrealists' obsession with sexuality into derision by parodying the forms of Chirico and Magritte. Toyen's eroticism is also tinged with humor. Mischievous and enchanting (p.117), emphasizes Chadwick, it remains good-natured. We are therefore here very far from Bellmer's lubricity; amateurs will rather go seek it with Leonor Fini.

Without truly speaking of taboo, this proven rejection of the expression of sexuality feeds their difficulty in existing individually. They consequently turn toward collective activities and, irony of fate, excel in "secondary" tasks like the creation of objects; the surrealists judge this activity reactionary. Paradoxically, it is they who assure them the notoriety that, until then, had been refused to them while being a source of security and financial autonomy. This does not go without certain frustrations. This is the case of Meret Oppenheim, who sells jewelry (these jokes, as she is accustomed to name these unusual objects she manufactures entirely) to Maison Schiaparelli. These objects are also marked by a modest and implicit sexuality; Eileen Agar's The Angel of Anarchy (1936) remains the perfect expression of this veiled eroticism. Unjustly unknown, Nusch Eluard's series of photo-collages (1935) (the only one with Rita Kernn-Larsen to have integrated feminine nudes — when masculine nudes predominate in her colleagues' works — into her works) testifies to this desire for existence outside the surrealist yoke. Chaste, implicit, often desexualized, women's gaze on eroticism will never, however, embrace surrealist aspirations. And this absence of erotic language contributes to limiting their participation in this aspect of surrealism.

As if to compensate for this deficiency, they claim the identification, posited as acquired by the surrealists, between nature's fecundating powers and theirs. Surrealism indeed conceives nature as a metaphor for feminine reality, whose duality it reconciles. This principle is at the primary source of their art, as Éluard signifies: "The blood that flows on the grass mixes with the dew, it flees and the wind replaces it. Fascinated by the principle of fecundity, the surrealists are much less interested in its concrete results, which hardly encourages their offspring. Fundamentally hostile to the family institution, they comfort their companions in the ethereal role of woman-child, bearer of a quasi-mystical feeling of nature 13". Maternal instinct is hardly reconcilable with the demands of artists' and "artist's companion" life. Thus, with the exception of Jacqueline Lamba and Rita Kernn-Larsen, these artists will not be mothers, at least not before the 1940s; their work can thus be interpreted as an outlet for this desire/this absence of desire for maternity: I lost three children, says Frida Kahlo. Painting has replaced them all (p. 134).

Consequently, the feeling of maternity is exteriorized by that of nature; recourse to symbols (Chadwick develops those of the partridge and the egg) is therefore almost systematic. Mythology occupies a privileged place in the expression of this psychic reality, anchored in an archaic tradition and populated by divinities (Celtic, Amerindian, etc.) and legendary creatures. References to alchemy also abound. The strangeness of these works, devoid of any folklore, thus rests on the duality of this feminine cosmogony that makes the universality of myths coincide with intimacy. The language of nature transcends sexual impulse to become a sanctifying life force in which vegetation and water are omnipresent; this is the case of Remedios Varo and Alice Rahon-Paalen who feel feminine art as the receptacle of their regenerative powers. Leonora Carrington's redemptive occultism is, for its part, based on everyday objects, traditional attributes of woman (cooking, knitting, domestic tasks, etc.). Nature is therefore envisaged as a space where consciousness of sexuality can freely express itself. Automatism, intended to liberate images from the unconscious, plays a decisive role (notably with Emmy Bridgewater and Alice Rahon-Paalen) in that it maintains this primitive connivance with the forces of nature. It is this type of spirituality, marked by a quasi-animistic feeling of nature, that haunts the canvases of Eileen Agar, Frida Kahlo, Ithell Colquhoun and Rita Kernn-Larsen, who appropriate this earth-mother at the origin of their art. The author's insistence on the "esoteric" content of these works is also the weak point of this book. The inscription of feminine imagination in a "telluric"/"chthonic" tradition occupies almost a third of the work when other aspects are kept aside. Although its presence is incontestable, esotericism probably does not justify the systematization of its recourse.

Woman's role in the creative cycle is also a late heritage of medieval society. Michelet's influence is undeniable and La Sorcière participates in the myth of the androgyne in surrealism; Breton indeed envisages the link between alchemy and eroticism as a means of abolishing opposites, thereby opening the way to the marvelous. Opposite to their companions, who celebrate the fusion of male and female principles, women clearly claim feminine identity, whose experience, even mystical, is perfectly distinct from that of the opposite sex. Mother goddess and goddess all the same, the surrealist woman is therefore adorned with heavy attributes, observes Chadwick, citing Matta: "Women were magical objects for the surrealists" (p. 181). Some however, like Valentine Penrose, fully assume this role of "magical woman-object," depositary of hermetic knowledge 14. The tension between nature and sexuality remains nevertheless predominantly a very heavy tribute for a handful of women who claim only a right to exist outside this belief.

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Knowledge of women belongs to woman
Paul Eluard 15

In view of these conclusions, the reader is tempted to believe like the author that Les Vases communicants is only a simple confirmation of the effective incompatibility between poetic beliefs and affective needs (p. 7). And, fundamentally, it would be a shame to remain at such a dogmatic conclusion. Chadwick indeed deplores that surrealism has transformed woman into an abstract, universal and ideal principle (p. 65). Nothing is more false; the idea of woman must, in no case, prevail here over the real woman. The error would be to comfort the surrealists in an image of "men of words" with precepts singularly unadapted to the necessities of real life. If their "daily" reality 16 can sometimes prove Chadwick right, it is within certain limits. And not within those of a cliché.

Where she is nevertheless in the right, is when she explains that: "The surrealists do not propose a woman independent of man [...] but a new image of the couple, in which woman completes man, is brought to life by him, and in return inspires him. The role of the woman artist as creator can only be found in her works" (p. 65). It is effectively vis-à-vis the notion of couple that surrealism, enemy of the tyranny-cretinization of thought, takes a step back. This questioning obviously includes Woman, but less as an individual than as a founding principle of the couple.

These artists do not recognize themselves in a dogma that requires them to be woman or artist. This is legitimate, according to Chadwick, since this dilemma only arises in literature. In reality, they are only asked to be Woman, that is to say to confine themselves to the role of inspirer, not creator, of the work of art. We can easily imagine today the extent generated by such frustration. Chadwick's conclusions are therefore the following: "Backed against the wall, women have cut short this painful dilemma by returning to the very origins of their condition." By her nature, woman is depositary of the secret of fecundity, at the origin of all creation. Woman is essentially determined to create works as she gives life, that is to say without other recourse than herself. This "privilege," concludes Chadwick, earns her being woman and artist, provided that this latent reality was expressed in a personal way, far from schemas that do not correspond to their profound nature. In sum, the muse/inspiration is internalized in woman when man seeks it outside himself. The representation of the sphinx in Leonor Fini's work, concludes Chadwick, symbolizes this conception because it does not pose the question of man's presence but of woman's place in the metamorphic process, which is at the heart of the surrealist vision of art (p. 180). To theory, surrealist women therefore substitute their intimate experience. This does not prevent mixing theory with practice: Grace Pailthorpe thus conducted side by side, alongside her husband, a career as psychoanalyst and painter.

One can also regret that Chadwick has privileged the visual reality of feminine art when literary expression plays an equal role. This is all the more regrettable since the women (with the exception of Eileen Agar and Toyen) discussed in this work have a literary activity parallel, even anterior (Alice Rahon-Paalen), to their painter's work. This activity is more or less unofficial; Leonora Carrington fills, like Remedios Varo, entire notebooks with stories (notably those of her dreams) and short stories. Some are published, others confided to the entourage: Frida Kahlo notably has the habit of offering pages from her intimate journal to her close ones. Moreover, not a literary genre is hidden, not even the novel 17, which earns them the wrath of the surrealists who do not hide their contempt for the novelistic genre.

Already hardly recognized as painters, they are even less so as writers; witness this comment by Jacqueline Lamba on the occasion of Frida Kahlo's first Parisian exhibition: "Women were still underestimated. It was difficult to be a woman painter" (p. 11). We are still in 1940 and surrealism is no longer in its first stammerings. This indifference is all the more paradoxical, observes Chadwick, since it was then easier for a woman to concretize the desire to write than that to paint (p. 221) 18. These works, which moreover exalt the feminine values exposed in Arcane 17, should not therefore according to her have encountered such a degree of incomprehension.

Yet, she still remarks: "[...] if the woman artist reached an ideological position created by man in her absence, it is thanks to her intuition. Her work is devalued by it: she can only be a contribution to a theoretical position that she has not elaborated. The work of women artists is received as a confirmation of that of men rather than as research into new forms" (p. 90). Here appear the limits of this work devoted to the question of women in surrealism when the question of men obviously does not arise. To evoke any feminine "participation" already supports the thesis according to which their activity has never been anything but this confirmation denounced by the author. This is in any case Leonor Fini's opinion who, like Meret Oppenheim, refused to appear in this work in the name of the following argument: a study entirely devoted to women is still a form of exile.

    1 — . "Women must be free and adored," affirmed Breton who, according to Nicolas Calas, generally detested the wives of artists he loved. ↩

    2 — . This motif would haunt Breton all his life, as evidenced by Arcane 17: "I choose the woman-child not to oppose her to the other but because in her, and only in her, seems to reside in a state of absolute transparency the other prism of vision." ↩

    3 — . Max Ernst's companion. ↩

    4 — . Name of the gallery opened by Breton, rue de Seine, in 1939, in reference to a short story (1903) by Wilhelm Jensen entitled Gradiva, a Pompeian fantasy; Gradiva is the feminine equivalent of Mars Gradivus, god of war. ↩

    5 — . This is a comment published in the New York Sun on the occasion of the exhibition 31 women, organized by Peggy Guggenheim. ↩

    6 — . The author cites an extract from La Révolution surréaliste n°11, p. 35. Breton thus bases himself partially on Pierre Janet's analysis, qualifying the ecstasy in which his patients are plunged as mad love. Using archives from the Salpêtrière hospital, Aragon and he celebrated in 1928 the fiftieth anniversary of hysteria, notably publishing photographs of women in a state of ecstasy grouped under the title "Passionate Attitudes." ↩

    7 — This judgment joins that of Leonor Fini: Leonora Carrington was a true revolutionary, but she was not surrealist, p.66. ↩

    8 — See also Emmy Bridgewater who felt, she says, no affinity with the French group, p.129. ↩

    9 — The couple's first joint exhibition – Kay Sage having always refused – finally took place a year before Tanguy's death. ↩

    10 — Leonora Carrington going so far as to say that this ideal was bullshit, p.66. ↩

    11 — . Chadwick reports some savory anecdotes on the question, notably about Lee Miller, who liked to wear to parties the golden handcuffs that Roland Penrose had given her and about Meret Oppenheim who judged it exquisite taste to urinate in a man's hat on the terrace of a Parisian café. ↩

    12 — . Dorothea Tanning did not hide her admiration for the Divine Marquis, but did not tolerate his contempt for women. ↩

    13 — . Max Ernst had nicknamed Leonora Carrington the "Bride of the Wind." ↩

    14 — . Breton was notably inspired by Eliphas Levi, French occultist of the 19th century, who recognized in woman the power to transform anguish into ecstasy. ↩

    15 — . Preface to Dons des féminines by Valentine Penrose. ↩

    16 — . Breton's circumspect silence during Nadja's internment as well as his refusal to go visit her can, for example, play against him. ↩

    17 — . This is the case of Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colqhoune and Dorothea Tanning. ↩

    18 — . Workshops and Fine Arts schools are still forbidden to women and none can claim to benefit from artistic training comparable to that of a man. Social and family disapproval is also not foreign to these obstacles. ↩