7 talented surrealist women who could be worthy rivals of Frida Kahlo

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Surrealism was not only an artistic movement, but also a desire for freedom, encompassing all aspects of life. As Meret Oppenheim said, surrealist women lived and worked with a "conscious desire to be free." Like their male counterparts, Surrealist women were also political activists, women's rights advocates and revolutionary fighters. They lived extraordinary lives as free individuals, inventing their own beauty and dignity, expressing immediate energy, attractiveness and humor, and it is not surprising that some of them surpassed not only male artists, but also the legendary Frida Kahlo, whose paintings have been used for many years. immensely popular all over the world.

When eighteen-year-old Violetta Nozières confessed to poisoning her father on August 21, 1933, the French press exploded with indignation against her. According to public opinion, Violetta was a "frivolous girl", showing tendencies characteristic of newly-made "emancipated" women, leading a dissolute life, in contrast to her hardworking peers. It didn't matter if the accusations were true, in any case, the press decided to make her a scapegoat.

And yet, there was still a lonely voice of disagreement: the surrealists demonstrated their support for collective creativity, choosing Violetta as their Black Angel, a muse who would inspire them to continuously fight against the bourgeois mentality and its myths about law and order, logic and reason. The system that led to the social inequality of the post-industrial era and to the horror of the First World War was, according to the surrealists, irreparably flawed. To defeat it, not only a political, but also a cultural revolution was needed.

Thus, the emancipation of women was fundamental to the overthrow of capitalism and patriarchy, starting with a challenge to the bourgeois perception of women as inherently good, unselfish, submissive, ignorant, godly and obedient.

Poetry. Freedom. Love. The revolution. Surrealism is not whimsical escapism, but expanded awareness. The lack of boundaries and censorship provided a safe place to discuss and process the collective trauma of World War I, and also gave vent to the creative needs of women.

Although they were welcomed and actively involved in the movement, the surrealist understanding of women was still very deeply rooted in idealization stereotypes. Women were either perceived as muses and objects of inspiration, or aroused admiration as infantile figures, gifted with a vivid imagination due to their naivety and predisposition to hysteria.

It was through the work of surrealist women that women's identities really got the chance to flourish, firmly entrenched in the art world, as they appropriated the myth of the muse to express their full potential as active creators. For a long time, women artists were remembered mainly for their relationships, often sentimental. with male artists. Only recently has their work been independently analyzed and given the attention it deserves.

1. Valentine Hugo

Valentina Hugo was born in 1887 and received an academic education as an artist who studied at the Paris School of Fine Arts. Growing up in an enlightened and progressive family, she followed in her father's footsteps, becoming an illustrator and draftsman. Known for her work with Russian ballet, she has developed strong professional ties with Jean Cocteau. Through Cocteau, Hugo met her future husband Jean Hugo, great-grandson of Victor Hugo, and André Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement, in 1917.

Thanks to this friendship, she became more and more close to the newly formed group of artists, which included Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. During this time, she joined the Bureau of Surrealist Studies and exhibited her work in surrealist salons in 1933 and at the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936.

Suicide by fellow surrealists Rene Crevel and the departure of Tristan Tzara and Éluard, she left the Surrealist group forever. In 1943, her word was included in the Peggy Guggenheim Exhibition of 31 Women. Her first retrospective exhibition took place in Troyes, France, in 1977, ten years after her death.

2. Meret Oppenheim

Meret Oppenheim was born in Berlin in 1913 but moved to Switzerland at the start of World War I. Her mother and grandmother, who grew up in a prosperous family, were suffragettes. Grandmother was one of the first women to study painting. At her home in Karon, Meret met many intellectuals and artists such as the Dadaist painters Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, as well as the writer Hermann Hesse, who married her aunt (and later divorced her).

Her father, a physician, was a close friend of Carl Jung and often attended his lectures: he introduced Meret to analytical psychology and encouraged her to keep a dream diary from an early age. Thanks to this knowledge, Meret was perhaps the only surrealist who had an authority in psychoanalysis. Curiously, she was also one of the few Surrealists who preferred Jung to Freud.

In 1932, she moved to Paris to pursue her artistic career, making contact with Surrealism through the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. She soon became friends with the rest of the group, which at the time included Man Ray, Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Dali, Ernst and Rene Magritte.

Sitting in a Parisian cafe with Picasso and Dora Maar in 1936, Picasso noticed an unusual fur-lined bracelet designed for Elsa Schiaparelli's house on Oppenheim's wrist. In an explicit version of events, Picasso commented on how many things he enjoyed could be improved with a piece of fur, to which Oppenheim replied, "Even this cup and saucer?"

The result of this playful banter was Oppenheim's most famous surreal object, Déjeuner en Fourrure, which was bought by Alfred Barr for the newly created Museum of Modern Art. Considered "the quintessence of a surreal object," the fur-lined cup was the artist's first work in the museum's permanent collection. While her work was enthusiastically received by her male colleagues, she still struggled to establish herself as an artist in her own merits and avoid being a muse and an object of inspiration.

Her independent nature, emancipation and rebelliousness made her in the eyes of her male colleagues a fetishized embodiment of femme-enfant. This struggle for identity, the impact of anti-Semitism on her father's practices, and the surreal diaspora during World War II forced Meret to return to Switzerland. Here she fell into a deep depression and disappeared from the public eye for almost twenty years.

Actively working throughout the 1960s and 70s, she eventually distanced herself from the movement, rejecting references to surrealism from the time of Breton. Sympathizing with feminism, however, she never betrayed her Jungian belief that there is no difference between men and women, firmly refusing to participate in exhibitions "only for women."

Her mission in life was to shatter gender conventions and stereotypes, completely transcending gender division and regaining complete freedom of expression., - she said.

3. Valentine Penrose

One of the most critical and irreverent surrealist artists, Valentina Penrose has devoted much of her life to destroying the bourgeois perception of women as originally good, unselfish, husband-worshiping, submissive, ignorant, pious, hardworking, obedient wives and daughters.

One of the first women to join the movement, Penrose was fascinated by the examples of unorthodox women and lived an unconventional life herself. Born in 1978 as Valentina Bouet, she married the historian and poet Roland Penrose in 1925, taking his last name. She moved with her husband to Spain in 1936 to join the workers' militia in defense of the revolution. Her interest in mysticism and Eastern philosophy led her repeatedly to India, where she studied Sanskrit and Eastern philosophy. Valentina was particularly interested in Tantrism, in which she discovered a valuable alternative to the surreal obsession with "genital" attraction, influenced by Freud's psychoanalysis.

She believed that the surreal view of women as a necessary "other half" ultimately failed to free women from their bourgeois roles and prevented them from finding an independent path. Her growing interest in the occult and esotericism eventually drove a wedge between her and her husband, leading to a divorce in 1935. The following year, she again traveled to India with her friend and lover Alice Paalen. But after the two women separated, lesbianism became a recurring theme in Penrose's work, often centered around the characters Emily and Rubia. Her 1951 collage novel Feminine Gifts is considered an archetypal surreal book. Depicting the adventures of two lovers traveling through fantasy worlds, the book is a fragmented collection of bilingual poetry and juxtaposed collages, organized without succession and with an increased level of complexity.

Always challenging the stereotype of the ideal woman, in 1962 she published her most famous work, the romantic biography of serial killer Erzbieta Bathory, The Bloody Countess. The novel, which follows a lesbian gothic monster, required years of research in France, Britain, Hungary and Austria. Always closed to her ex-husband, she spent the last years of her life in his farmhouse with his second wife, American photographer Lee Miller, also known like Lady Penrose.

4. Claude Caon

Claude Caon has created many different characters to avoid discrimination and prejudice, starting with the choice of a pseudonym, a gender-neutral name that she has worn for most of her life. Kaon is a symbolic example of an artist who, while remaining almost unknown in his day, has gained popularity and recognition in recent years, being one of the most famous among women surrealists. Often considered the forerunner of postmodern feminist art, her gender art and the expanded definition of femininity that she has put forth have become fundamental precedents in postmodern discourse and second wave feminism.

Caon came into contact with the Surrealists through the Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires Association, where she met Breton in 1931. In the following years, she regularly exhibited with the group: her famous photograph of Sheila Legg standing in Trafalgar Square appeared in many magazines and publications. Despite the revolutionary position, the communists considered homosexuality a luxury that only the dissolute elite could afford.

Claude lived with her half-sister and lifelong partner, Suzanne Malherbe, who also adopted the male pseudonym Marcel Moore. Wage inequality deliberately deprived women of the opportunity to be self-sufficient, so they had to rely on Father Kaon's economic support to survive. With no external audience, Kaon's art was primarily created in a home environment, providing an unfiltered look at their artistic experimentation. Using masks and mirrors, Claude contemplated the nature of identity and its plurality, setting a precedent for postmodern artists such as Cindy Sherman.

With her photographs, Claude has rejected and transcended modernist (and surrealist) myths about essential femininity and the ideal woman, putting forward the postmodern idea that gender and attractiveness are in fact constructed and executed, and that reality is not simply learned through experience, but defined through discourse. During the German invasion, Claude and Marseille were arrested for their anti-fascist efforts and sentenced to death. Although they lived to see the day of liberation, Claude's health never fully recovered, and she eventually died at the age of sixty in 1954. Marcel survived her for several years, after which, in 1972, she committed suicide.

5. Maria Cherminova (Toyen)

Born Maria Cherminova, better known as Toyen, was a part of Czech surrealism, working alongside the surrealist poet Jindřich Štyrski. Like Kaon, Toyen also adopted a gender-neutral pseudonym. An ambiguous character, Toyen completely defied gender conventions, wearing both male and female clothing and adopting pronouns of both genders. Although she was skeptical of French Surrealism, her work largely coincided with the Breton movement, and by the 1930s, the artist had become an integral member of Surrealism. Always transgressive, Toyen's interest in dark humor and eroticism has cemented her in the surreal tradition of hypersexual, irreverent art, influenced by the works of the Marquis de Sade.

In 1909, Apollinaire found one of de Sade's rare manuscripts in the National Library of Paris. Deeply impressed, he described him as “the freest spirit that ever lived” in his essay L'oeuvre du Marquis de Sade, contributing to a resurgence of de Sade's popularity among surrealist painters. De Sade, in whose name sadism and sadism originate, spent most of his life either in prison or in mental hospitals for his writing that combined philosophical discourse with pornography, blasphemy, and erotic fantasies of violence. Despite severe censorship, his books have influenced European intellectual circles over the past three centuries.

Like bohemians before them, surrealists were intrigued by his stories, identifying with de Sade's revolutionary and provocative personality and admiring his conflicting attacks on bourgeois taste and stiffness. Mixing violence and attraction, the sadistic attitude became a means of releasing innate impulses hidden in the subconscious: - read the First Manifesto of Surrealism. Toyen paid tribute to the libertine writer with a series of erotic illustrations for the Czech translation of Shtyrsky's Justine.

The never-missing political aspect of Toyen's art, however, became more pronounced as the political situation in Europe deteriorated: the Tyr series reveals the destructive nature of war through the iconography of children's games. Settling in Paris in 1948 after the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, Toyen remained active until her death in 1980, continuing to work with poet and anarchist Benjamin Pere and Czech artist Jindrich Heisler.

6. Itel Kohun

Separated during World War II, second-generation surrealists tended to distance themselves from the mainstream, developing their own research directions. Female artists adopted the surreal idea of the mythical woman and transformed her into a powerful image of a sorceress and a being who controls her transformative and generative powers. Femme-enfant, which inspired the first generation of surrealist women, is now a femme-sorciere, the master of her own creative power.

While male artists seemed to require an external mediator, often a female body, as a mediator for their subconscious, female artists did not have such barriers, using their own bodies as the basis for their quest. I-otherness, the alter ego through which women artists explored their inner selves, was not the opposite sex, but nature itself, often portrayed through animals and fantastic creatures.

For their generation, surviving two world wars, an economic depression and a failed revolution, magic and primitivism were liberating. For artists, magic was a means of change, uniting and halting the development of art and science, a much-needed alternative to religion and positivism that led to the atrocities of war. Finally, for women, occultism has become a means of overthrowing patriarchal ideologies and empowering the female self.

It is not surprising that Itel Kohun became interested in the occult at the age of seventeen after reading Crowley's Abbey of Thelema. Educated at the Slade School of Art, she moved to Paris in 1931. However, it was in Britain that her career actually took off: after holding a number of solo exhibitions, by the end of the 1930s she became one of the prominent figures of British Surrealism. Her affiliation with the movement was short-lived, and she left after a year when she was forced to choose between surrealism and the occult.

While she continued to define herself as a surrealist artist, breaking formal ties with the movement allowed her to develop a more personal aesthetics and poetry. In her manner, she used many surreal techniques such as frottage, decalomania, collage, and also developed her own inspirational games such as parsemage and entoptic graphomania. Directing the dark force, Itel recognized in women the potential of creation, salvation and resurrection, which connected them with nature and space.

Her work, drawing parallels between nature conservation and the emancipation of women, set a powerful precedent for the further development of ecofeminism. The search for the lost goddess represented the reunification of women with Nature and the rediscovery of their own power, a journey leading to the return of knowledge and power.

7. Leonora Carrington

One of the longest-lived and most prolific Surrealist women, Leonora Carrington was a British artist who fled to Mexico during the Surrealist Diaspora. She was born in 1917 to a wealthy British textile manufacturer and an Irish mother. Due to her rebellious behavior, she was expelled from at least two schools. More than twenty years younger than most surrealists, Carrington came into contact with the movement exclusively through exhibitions and publications.

In 1937, she met Max Ernst at a London party. They immediately became close and moved together to southern France, where he quickly separated from his wife. At this time, one of her most famous works, "Self-portrait", was written. With the outbreak of World War II, Ernst was interned as an "unwanted foreigner", but was released thanks to the intercession of Eluard. Newly arrested by the Gestapo, he narrowly escaped an internment camp, prompting him to seek refuge in the States, where he emigrated with the help of Peggy Guggenheim and Varian Fry.

Knowing nothing about the fate of Ernst, Leonora sold her house and fled to neutral Spain. Devastated, she suffered a mental breakdown at the British Embassy in Madrid. Hospitalized, she was treated with shock therapy and heavy drugs that caused her to hallucinate and pass out. After a course of treatment, the woman fled to Lisbon, and then to Mexico. There she married Mexican ambassador Renato Deluc and lived with him for the rest of her life until her death in 2011. Her quest for female spirituality was based on Groves's 1948 essay, The White Goddess, which sparked renewed interest in pagan mythology. A popular myth for surrealist women was the myth of the matriarchal origins of humanity. Inspired by this new mythology, Surrealist women of the Second Wave envisioned fantastic egalitarian societies where humans and nature lived in harmony: a vision of the future created through women.

Art is so multifaceted that sometimes it is difficult to decide what you like and attract attention. Digital painting was no exception., which, surprisingly, raises many questions, causing double sensations and impressions. In addition, very few people know about how this work became part of the great art, for which today many fans of this trend are ready to shell out a tidy sum.