ABSTRACT
Surrealist influence in the United States was at its zenith in the 1940s when European artists and writers sought safe harbor in New York City and contributed to a number of significant shows and catalogs, such as, for instance, the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in 1942, which was organized by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. This chapter proposes to read a number of these figures through the lens of Surrealism, and suggest that their twin turn to both occult and gendered tropes was situated between the legacy of earlier surrealist women artists and the eventual dawn of New Age spirituality. In her essay, Susan Fort provides a very useful chronology of early US exhibitions that either showcased or included women surrealists. Surrealism, with its emphasis on the irrational and, by the end of the war, with the occult, was not considered part of a scientific and positivist future.
