ABSTRACT
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 chapter looks at some of the work of each woman named Eileen Agar, Leonora Carrington, Lee Miller, Grace Pailthorpe, Ithell Colquhoun, Edith Rimmington and Emmy Bridgwater, individually and demonstrates in what sense it was ‘surrealist’ while also deviating from ‘Surrealism’. All the women experienced loss, either in madness, broken relationships, or war; yet they tried to find a new unity through art, working with fragments of nature or rejected pieces of civilization. They also focused on the positively creative aspect of femaleness.
