From Leonor Feeney to Toyanne and Leonora Carrington. They're the other artists of Surrealism. And the exhibition Fantastic Women at the Schön Kunsthalle in Frankfurt is an effort to better understand these artists who helped define the movement.
You see the wide range of styles, of interests, and the red line is looking for freedom, for an individuality as a woman and as an artist. And they try doing that in the shadow of what has been called André Breton's sexist remarks. The co-founder of Surrealism's 1929-dated manifesto includes the line, The problem of women is the most marvellous and disturbing problem in all the world. According to art historians, the only way female artists could become a part of Breton's circle was either in the role of a companion or a model. Many of the artists were much younger than the men in the group.
And they arrived around 1930 in Paris, they looked for freedom. But some of them became girlfriends or collaborators of male artists. While their male counterparts depicted women as objects of desire, female artists were searching for a new identity by exploring their own reflection or by adopting different roles through their work. With the female artists of surrealism, it's always about the female body and female sexuality from a female perspective.
And in the past years, their works are regaining recognition, with retrospectives such as this one in Frankfurt and at Sotheby's. In fact, the auction house was one of the first to organise such a show. Its senior vice president Julian Dawes once said that a lot of female surrealists are still fairly unknown to the general public, even to surrealism enthusiasts. Maybe that will slowly change.
Or is that too surreal to believe? Kate Conley joins me. She is a professor of Francophone studies at William and Mary University and the author of Surrealist Ghostliness. Hi, it's good to have you on our show today.
Thank you so much for coming. Thank you. Thank you. So, Kate, when I think of Surrealism, I think of, I don't know, Breton, Dali, Duchamp, you know, they're all men. But then we just heard that women were actually a part of it as well.
So how, to what extent were they influential? I think that women became very influential as the movement progressed. So in the initial phases in the 1920s, there weren't very many women affiliated with the movement. But starting in the 1930s, more and more women participated in the movement, were exhibited in the major shows, were published by the journals and the press, signed the documents, the tracts. Surrealism had an ethos of equal love.
that wasn't really born out particularly well in real life, but that was nonetheless attractive to women. They felt that they were invited to participate and they did. But why didn't they participate in the beginning? In the beginning it was a group of male friends who got together, who conducted the first experiments.
There were a couple of women in the room, wives and girlfriends. Simone Breton, for example, is in the iconic photographs by Man Ray. But they weren't that present.
In those early years of the movement in the 1920s, it's really starting in the 1930s that women joined the movement more fully. Partly because it was in the 1930s that the movement became more international. And many of the women affiliated with Surrealism came from other countries.
They were not French. Leonore Carrington was British. Frida Kahlo was Mexican.
Dorothea Tanning was American. Lee Miller was American. Many of the women affiliated with the Surrealist movement who were attracted to its aesthetic were from other countries. So they helped to internationalize the movement. Okay, so in the beginning women were part of the movement, I think, as just companions or models.
And then they sort of... Primarily. Yes. So, and obviously, Andre Breton, the leader of the movement, he asserted that it was a Above all a revolutionary movement.
So I want to ask you how revolutionary was it when it comes to male gaze? I think that it was unique in the avant-garde world at the time because women were invited to participate, women were included. Dorothea Tanning has a lovely sentence on the first page of her first autobiography, Birthday, in which she said it was a banquet open to one and all. She felt invited to participate.
in the banquet, she's referring to Plato's Symposium, which was a conversation, she felt that she was invited into the conversation as a woman in the movement. Okay, Boyd Haycock says, he is an art critic, art historian, he says that Breton was seeking control as a leader, especially including of women. Do you agree that he was sort of trying to have a hold of women in the movement?
I think he was trying to have a mo- a hold on the movement, I think that first statement is absolutely true. And Breton had sort of a domineering personality. One aspect of Breton's personality, though, that I think was positive for the movement as a whole is that every time he fell in love, he would write a new book, and it would be a tribute to the new woman he had fallen in love with.
And he was always willing to admit that he was wrong. This is a very endearing... character trait in a domineering personality that he was willing to say well I thought I had it right but I didn't fully have it right and now I've met this new person and she's transformed my life and now I'm thinking in new ways so the first book he wrote that was in honor of a woman was Nadja in 1928 the second one was mad love in 1937 and the third one was Arcanum 17 in in 1945. So he was constantly renewing his own ideas and revising himself, and often those revisions were influenced by women in his life. Okay, so moving on from this, Kate, we do see a lot more female surrealists in major exhibitions around the world lately.
Do you feel like the ground is shifting towards more understanding and a grasp of the situation? I certainly hope so. I have to say that the first history of the Surrealist movement that came out really didn't mention women at all. So it has taken scholars like me, many scholars starting with Whitney Chadwick, Marianne Cause, Susan Suleiman, who wrote books and mounted exhibitions that really taught us a lot more about who the women were. There also was more interest in paying attention to the paintings by women and the writings by women.
One aspect that drew women to Surrealism was the idealization of the woman by Surrealists. poets and painters. And women artists became very interested in revising that version of the idealized female muse by the men. And so they contributed self-portraits and autobiographies in abundance that basically had the effect of saying, no, this is what a woman looks like.
This is what it's like to really be a woman in the surrealist movement. So there are testimonials starting in the 1930s that come from women about what their experience was to be a surrealist artist. And these are increasingly available, and I think they're changing the way we understand the history. Well, let's hope that they will keep changing the way we understand history.
Kate Conley, good to have you on our show today. Thank you so much.