ABSTRACT
In the Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism, 1942, André Breton stated that ‘the relationship between men and women must be totally revised without a trace of hypocrisy’. The male Surrealists were dedicated to Mad Love; love was the only passion strong enough to bring down the frontiers between reality and possibility, truth and dream. Love enabled ordinary people to become poets and respectable citizens to turn into demons. Eroticism for them was not merely the cult of beauty, but a trigger for artistic creativity. Under the lash of the unconscious, sexual drives having been sublimated à la Freud, body and mind would reunite in an act of spontaneous creation. The basis of the philosophy of Surrealism was this connection of inspiration with spontaneity rather than with the will. The ability to let the unconscious express itself with no mediation other than the artist’s hand was called Automatism. In the Surrealist process of creation there was no author, but a scriptor, a hand writing or painting under the direct influence of the unconscious. Like the medium coming into contact with the world beyond, the artist must relax the grip of reason and surrender to the flow of imagination. It was called ‘disinterested thinking’ because it was oblivious to all kinds of academic standards of conventional beauty. Beauty, for the Surrealists, came out of unexpected associations of ideas and images, revealing the existence of a ‘law of chance’ or hasard objectif. It brought to light a happy coincidence between the mechanical order of actuality and the realm of the highly improbable the Absurd or dream world. On account of this emphasis on spontaneity and the irrational, women and children were considered, theoretically, to be ‘naturals’ as Surrealist artists. But in actual fact it was very hard for women to become recognized artists, for they had also to outgrow the male Surrealists’ dual stereotype of womanas-child and woman-as-Muse. It has often been suggested that to become a woman Surrealist a woman artist had to become a male Surrealist’s lover first (and indeed body-and-soul affinities are very often the quickest way into any avant-garde, secretive community). What is
remarkable, however, is not the number of liaisons between male Surrealists and women artists-Eileen Agar with Paul Nash and Paul Eluard; Lee Miller with Man Ray, Cocteau, and Roland Penrose; Leonora Carrington with Max Ernst; Ithell Colquhoun with Tonio del Renzio-but that these women managed to assert their own artistic identity despite the inhibiting self-confidence of the more famous men. And the other British women Surrealists outside that charmed inner circle followed their own bent almost without male patronage or assistance of any kind. (On the contrary, as Emmy Bridgwater has testified, Roland Penrose excluded an obscure provincial like herself from any entrée into contact with the current work of his friend Picasso, among others.)
The International Surrealist Exhibition in London in July 1936-a wildly controversial ‘event’ organized by Herbert Read, Roland Penrose, and David Gascoyne, with Dali in deep-sea diver’s costume-was the catalyst that revealed the revolutionary possibilities of Surrealist art to sympathetic young women painters in Britain. Out of that Exhibition came the avant-garde periodicals London Bulletin, Fulcrum, and Arson to which many of them then contributed. This essay will look at some of the work of each woman individually and try to demonstrate in what sense it was ‘surrealist’ while also deviating from ‘Surrealism’.
