Muses to masters: the Surrealist women who rose from a sexist shadow
Until quite recently, we’ve come to know the Surrealist movement as being dominated by male artists, with Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp and René Magritte being the typically familiar names.
Indeed, when this movement was born from the post-war faltering Dada movement, society was still incredibly gendered, and women stayed unrecognised almost in every academic and professional sphere.
However, that never meant they didn’t exist. On the contrary, they were yet to be discovered and celebrated in their own right. At the time, the most we would see of a woman was her being the subject in a painting, as male Surrealists were too focused on exploring sexual fantasies, which played a big role in their exploration of the subconscious, inspired by their fascination with theories of Freudian psychoanalysis.
Thus, female muses in surrealist paintings that drape the walls of the Reina Sofia in Madrid or the Victoria and Albert Museum are portrayed as fragmented and grotesque, and sometimes idealised as both objects of fear and desire. But what about their lives and stories? Only recently have we begun to give credit to the female Surrealist artists who were pigeon-holed into being muses and partners of their great male counterparts for far too long.
After André Breton established the Surrealist manifesto in 1924, women slowly began to enter the scene by developing relationships with already-established writers and painters, often evolving from muses to partners or lovers. For example, Meret Oppenheim and Lee Miller both worked with the artist Man Ray.
Eventually emancipating themselves from their partners and with a desire to build an artistic identity of their own, these female artists created many of their works decades later in the 1940s and ’50s, when the Surrealist movement was thought to have long died. The general consensus still today is that the movement ended not long after the Second World War, but in actual fact, many of the women were still prominent until the ’60s—another example of their rejection.
Additionally, women were shunned because of the common misconception that they were witches and untrustworthy due to their magical powers. For the majority of history, this association has been seen as a huge threat, and so, with little to no proof, was used as an excuse to oppress women and keep them from the group. In hindsight, this logic seems rather hypocritical, considering that the premise of the group was to explore the subconscious and irrational.
Up until the 1980s, the female artists of the Surrealist movement still remained unrecognised. Artist Roland Penrose announced with conviction in an interview that these women “were our muses […] they weren’t artists”.
But a truly pivotal moment occurred in the early 1980s, when art historian Whitney Chadwick produced a vital book called Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, that finally explored the movement as a whole, recognising and giving credit to the female artists involved.
Two of the most important examples of female Surrealists were Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, who were formerly recognised thanks to their individual relationships with Max Ernst.
Carrington, a British artist, met Ernst at a party in the early ’30s and they became lovers. She was determined to become a name for herself and build an identity that was separate from Ernst’s, declaring, “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling […] and learning to be an artist.”
Her painting, Portrait of Max Ernst, done in 1939, is a fantasiastical portrait of Ernst in a magical glacial world, recalling the irrational dream-like spaces of the subject’s own work.
When Ernst went to war, Carrington suffered so intensely from his absence that she passed away from a mental breakdown. Ernst would return and go on to have another relationship with artist Dorothea Tanning, who had come into contact with Surrealism in the 1930s in New York.
Tanning’s paintings were much more Dalí-esque and obscure, with uses of darker colour palettes on twisted nonsensical figures. For example, her 1942 work, Birthday, is a self-portrait in a flamboyant dress covered in what looks like seaweed, in a never ending room filled with doors, and accompanying her is a bird and mammal hybrid creature. Although she presents herself as rather feminine with her breasts exposed, other works by Tanning show a gender role reversal, giving her female subjects agency, while the men are often more passive.
The female Surrealists wanted to rebel against gender-specific behaviours and representations that had personally impacted them, adopting more androgynous features. For example, later photographers Claude Cahun, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Ithell Colquhoun, all explored their own sexuality as queer and non-binary persons through their works.
Cahun was famously quoted, saying, “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”
