Event Category: Surrealism

Whitney Chadwick’s pioneering study Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985) transformed the position of the women associated with the movement. It was controversial – Dorothea Tanning and Leonor Fini both felt being singled out would perpetuate their ‘exile’, and Meret Oppenheim refused permission to reproduce any of her work in the book. They were not alone in questioning the legitimacy of separating their work from that of male surrealists, rejecting the implication that it was conditioned by their gender, and insisting that the creative spirit is androgynous. However, there is no doubt that since the publication of Chadwick’s book artists like Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Dora Maar, Frida Kahlo and Claude Cahun, all closely associated with Surrealism at some point in their lives, have become hugely popular and if anything more familiar than their male colleagues.

It’s pleasing to see justice done, of course, but the question remains, why were the many women associated with the movement ignored or sidelined for so long? It used invariably to be the male faces that defined the movement. What might it have to do with one of the central paradoxes of Surrealism, that Woman was elevated as the muse and object of desire, given a central and revolutionary role in the aim of transforming the world, but women were often in practice denied a voice? What has the vastly increased visibility of women artists and their work in recent years added to our understanding of Surrealism? I propose to take a sideways look at the issues, and focus on some striking female alliances, and one instance of discord: the long friendship, shared ideas and occasional collaborations between Carrington and Varo; the union of the artist Alice Paalen (Rahon) and the poet Valentine Penrose; the joint work of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore; and the curious and one-sided rivalry between Frida Kahlo and María Izquierdo. These will throw light on different ways in which women artists responded to, challenged or ignored the male surrealists’ attitudes to Woman and women.

Dawn Ades is Professor Emerita of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex. She writes about Dada, Surrealism, photography, and women artists among other things, and has organised or co-curated many exhibitions, including Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978); Art in Latin America: the Modern Era 1820-1980 (1989); Dalí’s Optical Illusions (2000); Salvador Dalí: the Centenary Exhibition (2004); Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (2006); Close-Up: Proximity and Defamiliarisation in Art, Photography and Film (2008); and Dalí/Duchamp, (Royal Academy and the Dalí Museum 2017-18). Apart from the catalogues associated with these exhibitions, publications include Photomontage (1986), Marcel Duchamp (with N. Cox and D.Hopkins, 1999), A Dada Reader (2006) and Writings on Art and Anti-art (2015).

A recording of this lecture will be sent to ticketholders who miss the live performance

Live from Mexico City Teresa Arcq will discuss her LACMA exhibition

In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and The United States

The surrealist movement in art is most often identified with male artists, many of whom objectified women in their paintings, casting them as sexual or symbolic ideals. Conversely, the female artists of the movement delved primarily into their own subconscious and dreams. This lecture features the work of up to 48 Mexican and U.S.-based women artists whose contributions to the surrealist movement span more than four decades and whose work was both influential and radical in its own right.This unique lecture illustrates surrealism as a gateway to self-discovery, especially in North America, where women artists were freed from oppressive European traditions and the vagaries of war. From 1931, the year of Lee Miller’s first surreal photograph, to 1968, when Yayoi Kusama presented her landmark happening ‘Alice in Wonderland’ in New York’s Central Park, the artists and works depicted here are both significant and extraordinary in their explorations of personal and universal truths

Tere Arcq was Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico and Director of an International Art Investment Fund. As an independent curator, she creates and produces exhibitions in Mexico and abroad. Her most recent is Leonora Carrington Magical Tales at Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City and MARCO in Monterrey. In 2012 she curated In Wonderland. The Adventures of Women Surrealists in Mexico and the United States, an international project presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The National Museum of Fine Arts in Quebec and The Modern Art Museum in Mexico.

Her expertise in the art world includes, teaching; edition of art books and exhibition catalogues; collaboration in the production of documentaries and short films on artists and the design and organization of specialized art tours for collectors. She is a frequent lecturer at museums, institutions and universities worldwide.

Tere Arcq is an Art Historian with a Masters Degree in Museum Studies and Art Management.

Andre Breton did not believe that he had invented Surrealism in the early 1920s. Rather – as a sort of archaeologist of the unconscious – he was uncovering something that had always been there, existing at all times and in all places. Steeped as they were in the work of William Blake and Lewis Carroll, this idea of Surrealism was particularly appealing to many of the British artists and writers who became involved in the movement in the 1930s. Surrealism promised to break down the boundaries between everything: ‘The divisions we may hold between night and day – waking world and that of the dream, reality and the other thing, do not hold,’ wrote Paul Nash, one of the leading British surrealists. ‘They are penetrable, they are porous, translucent, transparent; in a word they are not there.’

In this talk, freelance art historian Dr David Boyd Haycock – curator of the short lived ‘British Surrealism’ exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in the spring of 2020 – will explore the history of the movement in this country, from the Gothic to the Neo-Romantic.

The Marquis de Sade’s status as an icon of free and subversive expression was largely bestowed on him in the twentieth century. Then, his appeal went beyond the orgiastic tableaux he crafted in his libertine novels and a broader sense of his ‘philosophy of the boudoir’ was seized as a radical voice for the avant-garde’s engagement with sexual desire and social politics. This talk will consider why Surrealist artists such as Man Ray, André Masson, Hans Bellmer, Toyen and Leonor Fini claimed the Marquis de Sade as “a hero of love, of generosity and of liberty”, and how they brought the Sadean imagination into play in their art.

Speaker: Alyce Mahon is a Professor of Modern & Contemporary Art History at the University of Cambridge, England. She is the author of Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968 (Thames & Hudson, 2005), Eroticism & Art (Oxford University Press, 2005 and 2007) and The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde (Princeton University Press, 2020), as well as numerous journal, book and catalogue essays on Surrealism and its dialogue with eroticism and gender politics. She also works with major museums on Surrealist exhibitions and was the guest curator of Dorothea Tanning, Behind the Door Another Door, the first major retrospective exhibition of the American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning (1901-2012), for the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (Oct. 3, 2018 –Jan. 7, 2019) and the Tate Modern, London (Feb. 27–June 6, 2019), and the head advisor for the first survey show of Argentine-Italian Surrealist Leonor Fini (1907-1996) in the United States, titled Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire 1930-1990 and on show at the Museum of Sex, New York (Sept. 28, 2018-March 4, 2019). Her talk will focus on her new book on the Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde and her longstanding interests in the dynamics between art, sex, and politics.