My latest art obsession is Surrealism, especially the female artists involved with the movement. Several courses I took last semester were about modern art, and I finally started paying attention to Surrealism, which I’d previously written off, having only knowing its male participants and their infamous sexism. Surrealism was certainly rooted in a chauvinistic and phallocentric narrative, but many women artists participated in the movement as well, and took on its nonconformist motivations to create their own subversive and progressive artworks. In this post, I’ll highlight ten of the most important and influential women in the movement.
Women surrealists had some shared influences with their male counterparts, but many took on different focuses. Self-portraits were more common with female artists in the movement, disrupting the idea of the feminine muse. These women, many of whom had been portrayed by male artists, could now depict themselves as the subject rather than the object of their art. Both in their personal lives and artworks, many of these women challenged patriarchal ideas, gender stereotypes and dynamics, and heterosexuality. Many of these artists were openly lesbian or had relationships with women, and many chose untraditional forms of gender expression, often choosing androgynous and unconventional characteristics when depicting themselves and other female figures in their art.
Leonora Carrington (1917-2011)
Carrington was a British-born Mexican painter and writer. Born to a wealthy family, she rejected the traditional upper-class life laid out for her to run away with Max Ernst, a fellow Surrealist, and became an artist herself. Carrington created countless paintings, characteristically figurative in style and fantastical in content. Besides visual art, she wrote several whimsical, unsettling short stories and novels, such as “The Debutante” and “Pigeon, Fly!”. A great deal of her art and writing shared common symbols, such as horses, hyenas, and other mythical and existent beasts, many of which signified various aspects of the female existence.
During the war, Carrington and Ernst went their separate ways. Ernst, a foreigner, had to flee from France. Carrington went to live alone in Spain, where she suffered from mental health issues, but soon went back to painting. Without Ernst, her legacy and work were free from being overshadowed by his own. She moved to Mexico where she remained for the rest of her life. True to her rebellious nature, she was involved in the country’s Women’s Liberation movement. Throughout her life, Carrington resisted patriarchal society and paved the way for her contemporaries and successors.
Claude Cahun (1894-1954)
Cahun was a French photographer and writer, best known for her unique and subversive self-portraits. Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, Cahun adopted the intentionally gender-neutral pseudonym in 1917. Being a working class, half-Jewish, homosexual woman, she was no stranger to prejudice. She was both a Surrealist and a communist, but neither group fully accepted her due to her overt lesbian identity. Her unconventional, gender-defying self-portraits were precursors to later feminist art, and challenged and expanded perceptions surrounding traditional femininity. Cahun’s work was mostly made for a small audience, for herself, her partner Suzanne Malherbe, and their friends; her photographs were intimate, uncensored, and progressive.
Cahun’s non-binary gender expression in her art was reflecting of her own identity. She expressed that “neuter is the only gender that suits me.” During the German invasion of France, she and her partner were sentenced to death for their anti-fascist efforts, but both survived past the war. Cahun was ill, and passed away at age 60. Her art and writing were sorely overlooked during her lifetime, but she gained recognition in the 1990s during the rise of attention towards gender issues. Cahun’s legacy lives own, and her photography has inspired many post-modern female and non-binary artists.
Leonor Fini (1907-1996)
Argentinian-American painter Leonor Fini had a turbulent childhood, escaping repeated attempts of kidnapping by her father after her parents’ separation. Raised in Trieste, Italy, by a single mother, Fini grew up reading and studying classical art and psychology and teaching herself to paint. She moved to Paris in 1931 with her fiancé, Prince Lorenzo di Trabia, to begin her career as an artist. There, she met Max Ernst, who became her lover (the same one who was involved with Carrington), and introduced her to other Surrealists. Despite her involvement in the movement, Fini refused to label herself as a Surrealist, likely due to the misogyny of the movement’s leader Andre Breton and other male members.
Fini’s early work is recognizable by her powerful, untraditional femmes fatales and mythological figures. Her female characters defy gender dynamics, often taking positions of power and autonomy in ways that challenged the objectified, fetishized women painted by male surrealists. Fini continued to work throughout her life, expanding her career to book illustrations, Schiaparelli perfume bottle designs, set and costume designs for theatre and film, and eventually writing novels. Her artistic style evolved in the 1960s and later, becoming more muted, dreamy, and stylized. She also experimented with erotica, especially homo-erotica, in both illustrations and painting. Though Fini never married, she had many lovers, both male and female. Her liberated sexuality in art and life challenged concepts of heterosexuality and femininity even before feminism was a fully developed ideology.
Valentine Hugo (1887-1968)
Hugo was a French artist and writer, and one of the earliest members of Surrealism. Having grown up in an open-minded family and having a professional painter and illustrater for a father, Hugo was able to pursue an education and career in art at a time when few women were permitted to do so. Hugo studied at the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts, and participated in the Salon des artistes français in 1909. She met Andre Breton in 1917, and grew connected with other members of the newly formed Surrealist group. She exhibited several of her works with the group, and created several exquisite corpse drawings with them, introducing new media to the practice.
She worked in multiple media, including sketching, engraving, costume design, and painting. Besides working with the Surrealists, she published fashion illustrations for La Gazette du bon ton, and designed sets and costumes for the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, the Noailles and Beaumont costume balls, and various theatre productions.
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)
One of the most famous artists from this era, Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter involved with the Surrealists. Despite Breton’s proclamation of Kahlo as a surrealist, Kahlo refused to be pinned down to a single movement, instead developing her own iconic style. Kahlo’s grave injury caused by a bus accident forced her to be bedridden for a prolonged period of time. It was at this time when her artistic career took off. Her many health issues both enabled and inspired her artwork, and many of her paintings touch on her own illnesses and medical and macabre symbolism. Her unique, expressive self-portraits are akin to her Surrealist contemporaries.
Kahlo’s marriage with fellow artist Diego Rivera furthered her career, both aided by Rivera’s artistic encouragement but also inspired by the stress caused by their turbulent relationship. Rivera and Kahlo were both unfaithful, and like Fini, Kahlo had affairs with women, which also influenced her work. Her art explores concepts of sexuality and femininity, and like many other Surrealist artists, defies traditions of cisnormativity and heteronormativity. Additionally, Kahlo’s work reflects themes of Mexicanidad, indigeneity, and Latinx identity.
Dora Maar (1907-1997)
Though generally overshadowed by her relationship with Pablo Picasso, French-born Dora Maar was one of the most influential artists of the Surrealist movement. A photographer, painter, and poet, her radical and innovative work inspired many artists throughout history. Academically trained in both painting and photography, Maar first pursued the more financially stable field of commercial photography. Her work gained recognition quickly, with her mastery of various techniques and elements of the art. Her photography was political as well as artistic, and street photography, especially depicting harsh realities of injustice, poverty, and discrimination, was incredibly important to her.
Maar became involved with the Surrealists in 1933 and was one of the few women included in their exhibitions. Her experimental photography and shared themes of eroticism, sleep, and altered reality appealed to them. Despite many hardships in life, she continued working until her death in 1997. Although she focused on painting after the 1940s, she returned to photography in the 1980s, switching to abstract and even more experimental work.
Lee Miller (1907-1977)
Born in the United Sates, photographer Lee Miller was introduced to photography from a young age. Her childhood was turbulent, after sexual abuse, expulsions from various schools. In her late teens, Miller studied lighting and set design, and moved to Paris. Later, she returned to New York to study life drawing and painting, and began a career as a model. Then, after moving back to Paris, she met Man Ray, to whom she would become a model and student, and eventually romantic partner. Through this partnership, Miller’s career blossomed, both as an artist and muse, and she met several artists, including surrealists.
In Paris, Miller continued to model and take photographs, and became involved with other artists and Surrealists. During World War II, Miller’s career moved to photojournalism, her photographs published in Vogue and the book Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire (1941). Overshadowed by her better known associate artists, Miller’s art was rediscovered after her death, by her son’s creation of the Lee Miller archives. Her art, with its effortless combination of art photography and photojournalism, helped shape both pursuits. Her confrontational, innovative, and realistic images are some of the most important contributions to photographic history we have today.
Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985)
German-Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim is well known for her prolific, diverse career. Both model and multi-media artist, Oppenheim met many artists and intellectuals through her culturally enlightened household. Her mother and grandmother were suffragettes, and her father was a physician and friend of psychologist Carl Jung, who introduced Oppenheim to psychoanalysis very early on. In 1932, she moved to Paris to pursue art, where she befriended the Surrealists. In 1936, at a café with Picasso and Dora Maar, Picasso noted Oppenheim’s fur-lined bracelet, and commented on how many things could be improved with fur, to which Oppenheim replied, “even this cup and saucer?” This conversation would go on to inspire Oppenheim’s infamous Object (Le Déjenuer en fourrure), the fur-lined teacup, spoon, and saucer.
Oppenheim’s work is playful and unique, ranging from painting and collage, to working with altered everyday objects à la readymade, to proto-performance art. Her later work expanded to fashion and costume design, highlighting the connections of high fashion and art. She designed costumes and sets for Picasso’s play Le Désir attrapé par la queue, as well as designing Surrealist clothing items for Schiaparelli. In later life, she refused the labels of feminist or surrealist, and took considerable efforts in controlling how she was remembered: preserving correspondence with viewing instructions, and destroying her own works. Few of her works remain, but her legacy lives on, and her style has inspired both art and fashion.
Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012)
Tanning was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet. Born to a working-class family, Tanning lacked the exposure to fine art that many of these other artists had. Passionate about art from an early age, Tanning taught herself to draw and paint, her only training a brief three-week stunt in night classes at the Chicago Art Institute. She moved to New York in 1935 to become a commercial artist, where she first encountered Dada and Surrealism. She was inspired by the movement, but did not meet any of its members until the 1940s. Among them, she met and later married Max Ernst (yes, the same one). The two moved back and forth from Europe to the States, both of their careers steady, and stayed together until Ernst’s death.
Tanning’s art is incredibly influential to subsequent artists. Her exploration of femininity and defiance of the restrictions placed on women artists linked her to feminism. Most notable for her paintings, she also experimented with sculpture and photography, illustration and costume design, and even writing and poetry. Her work is enthralling, erotic, corporeal, and whimsical. She lived till the age of 101, and continued to create art well into the last decade of her life.
Remedios Varo (1908-1963)
Born in Spain, Remedios Varo was raised by a devout Catholic mother and universalist father. As a child, she read countless fantasy novels and books on mysticism and alchemy. She was first introduced to art by her father, an engineer, whom she would help copy plans and diagrams. Continuing painting and drawing throughout her childhood, she moved to Madrid at 15 to study at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, and was one of the few women to attend. She moved to Paris in the early 1930s, where she met several surrealist artists and poets. She partook in their exhibitions, studied surrealist interests, and experimented with their techniques. During the second world war, she was arrested along with her partner for suspicion of political activity, and later fleed to Mexico. Here, she befriended several artists, including Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo.
Varo’s work experimented with concepts of fantasy, science fiction, and the occult, often blurring the lines between imagination and reality. Varo expressed her feminist beliefs through her art as well, painting independent, powerful, and often androgynous women figures. Her work often depicts confined women, speaking to her personal life and universal female experience.
Although I’ve highlighted a limited number of artists, many other women artists were involved with Surrealism: Toyen, Bridget Tichnor, Alice Rahon, Kay Sage, Ithell Coquhoun, Valentine Penrose, (technically) Louise Bourgeois, etc, etc… These artists helped shape the surrealist movement, but also influenced countless following movements. Andre Breton, one of the pioneers of surrealism, called for the “complete freedom of art”, but due to his overt homophobia and sexism, only extended these freedoms to heterosexual men. These female artists defied tradition in ways unthinkable to their male counterparts, and paved the way for modern and contemporary female artists throughout Europe and North America.
Header image: Leonor Fini and Leonora Carrington by Denise Colomb, 1952.
