The founding French Surrealists loved the subconscious. They also loved women—as muses, as subjects of erotic desire, as sources of inspiration, but not necessarily as artists at first. Women weren’t present at the birth of the movement when poet André Breton published his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. But inevitably women were attracted to the movement and its revolutionary ideas—interpreting dreams as expressions of subconscious thought, fusing the familiar with the unknown, and generally doing away with rational inhibition. Some of them came to Surrealism through contact with male Surrealists, some came on their own, and others, outside Paris, came to it as international exhibitions widened the Surrealist circle.
And so just a few years after Breton defined Surrealism, staking his claim in conceptual ground that it was “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought,” women actively participated. They showed their paintings, photographs, collages, assemblages, garments, and sculptures in group Surrealist exhibitions and had their own solo shows, with catalog introductions written by Surrealists in their circle.
Between 1924, when Breton released the first Surrealist Manifesto, and 1947, when a major exhibition at Galerie Maeght celebrated the postwar return of Surrealism to Paris, the “first generation” of Surrealists included numerous women, many more than the 15 included here. Each had her own complex relationship with the movement.
“The diversity of experience and attitude on the part of women artists active in Surrealism has proved both an obstacle and a challenge,” wrote art historian Whitney Chadwick in her groundbreaking 1985 text Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. “In the end, I came to view such diversity as a tribute to these women, an affirmation of their strength as individuals and a mark of their commitment to a form of creative expression in which personal reality dominates.”
Some of the artists profiled below proudly carried the label, and others emphatically denied being Surrealists. But in a sense, isn’t it a Surrealist trait par excellence to defy being squeezed neatly into a box?
Meret Oppenheim
Meret Oppenheim took useful things, often items used by women, and with simple interventions rendered them utterly bizarre. She set a gold ring with a sparkly white sugar cube instead of a jewel; in My Nurse (1936–37) she trussed two high-heeled shoes and set them on a metal platter like roasted poultry; and, most famously, she lined a teacup, saucer, and spoon in fur in her Object (1936), now one of the best known Surrealist sculptures. “The ‘fur-lined tea set’ makes concretely real the most extreme, the most bizarre improbability,” said museum director Alfred H. Barr when Object was shown in “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism,” a major 1936–37 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Oppenheim’s sculpture demonstrated the Surrealist habit of defying reason and allowing unconscious and unexpected connections to emerge. The Swiss artist entered the Surrealist circle after moving from Basel to Paris in 1932, becoming a muse to Man Ray. By 1936 she had her first solo show, in Basel, for which Max Ernst (briefly her romantic partner) wrote the introductory essay. Her work spanned assemblages, paintings, and design pieces (including furniture and accessories, some in collaboration with Elsa Schiaparelli). Still, she didn’t like being pigeonholed. “I never collaborated with the Surrealists. I always did what I wanted and was discovered by them by chance, you might say,” Oppenheim stated in a 1981 interview.
When World War II broke out, Oppenheim felt that her objects were too whimsical and shifted to painting, but she often destroyed or reworked her increasingly abstract canvases. By the late 1950s she had decided to end her affiliation with the Surrealists, and her final Surrealist work was Spring Banquet (1959), a feast served on a nude woman’s body, utensils forbidden, which she first created for a party in Bern and then staged, at Breton’s request, at the 1959 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris.
Dora Maar
Dora Maar never identified the intriguingly hideous creature appearing in one of her best-known photographs, Père Ubu (1936), which epitomizes her fusion of strangeness and beauty; some have guessed that it is an armadillo fetus. Of the six Surrealist exhibitions Maar participated in during the 1930s, Père Ubu was shown in three (including the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition).
Maar worked as a commercial photographer but also moved in Surrealist circles. She and Jacqueline Lamba studied together at the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and Maar befriended fellow photographer Man Ray around the time that he was working with Lee Miller (who also became a close friend). In her studio, Maar photographed Meret Oppenheim and Frida Kahlo. And she famously was Picasso’s lover and muse for nearly a decade.
At the photography studio that Maar opened in 1931 with Pierre Kéfer, she was commissioned by designers such as Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Jeanne Lanvin to create commercial photographs with an experimental touch. She brought techniques such as double exposure, photomontage, and collage to her commercial work, blurring reality and artifice and combining objects in unexpected ways. In The Years Lie in Wait for You (1935), a spiderweb is superimposed over the image of a woman’s face in a shot likely created as an advertisem*nt for an antiaging cream.
Eileen Agar
Collage was an important part of the practice of Argentine-British artist Eileen Agar. She filled her studio with what she called “fantastic bric-a-brac”—including textiles, fossils, bones, shells, leaves, and many other things she collected—and used this material to create chance combinations of curious objects. Among these is Angel of Anarchy (1936–40), for which she used a plaster head as a blank canvas and adorned it with fur, ostrich feathers, fabrics, seashells, and gemstones. Still, she was a somewhat reluctant Surrealist, unwilling to deny her love of Cubism and abstraction in order to fit in.
She first encountered the Surrealists when she briefly moved to Paris in 1929, where she befriended Breton and the French Surrealist poet Paul Eluard, with whom she would later have an affair. When Agar returned to England, she met the Surrealist painter Paul Nash, embarking on an intense artistic and romantic liaison with him (despite an ongoing relationship with the Hungarian writer Joseph Bard that would span 50 years).
Encouraged by Nash, Roland Penrose and Herbert Read visited her studio while curating the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, selecting three oil paintings and five objects. “The sudden attention took me by surprise,” Agar recalled of the visit. “One day I was an artist exploring highly personal combinations of form and content, and the next I was calmly informed I was a Surrealist!” She rejected the label but showed with them anyway, allowing Angel of Anarchy to be included in Surrealist exhibitions in London and Amsterdam.
Leonor Fini
Leonor Fini was all about metamorphosis, fluidity, and ambiguity, drawn to sphinxes and other human/animal hybrids. In The Shepherdess of the Sphinxes (1941), Fini painted nonsensical creatures that were half-woman, half-lion being shepherded by an oversize Amazon with a full mane of hair—an uncanny combination of realism and pure fantasy.
The self-taught Argentine-Italian painter famously used her own body as a laboratory of creative expression, dressing up in fantastical ways and wearing intentionally ripped clothes or masks. (Her friends Dora Maar and Lee Miller photographed her in these outfits for posterity.) She didn’t particularly want to become a card-carrying Surrealist, even though her approach resonated with the Surrealists’ interest in discovering hidden correspondences between things.
It was Breton who turned her off Surrealism. “I hated his anti-hom*osexual attitudes and also his misogyny,” the openly bisexual Fini said in a 1994 interview. “It seemed that women were expected to keep quiet, yet I felt that I was just as good as the men.” Still, she met many Surrealists after moving from Italy to Paris in 1931 and participated in major Surrealist exhibitions. After her first solo show in 1932 at Galerie Bonjean (then directed by Christian Dior), she contributed work to “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” at MoMA in 1936. In the same year, she also started showing with New York gallerist and Surrealist champion Julien Levy. Right before World War II erupted, Fini curated an exhibition of Surrealist furniturefor a Parisian gallery owned by her friend Leo Castelli, and Peggy Guggenheim included her in “31 Women”at her Art of This Century gallery in New York in 1943.
Dorothea Tanning
Surrealism made its way to the American-born painter, sculptor, and poet Dorothea Tanning when World War II forced many artists to leave Europe. After studying art in Chicago, Tanning worked as a freelance illustrator and then moved to New York, where she saw the landmark 1936 “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” exhibition at MoMA. “I thought, Gosh! I can go ahead and do what I’ve always been doing,” she later recalled. A few years later she met art dealer Julien Levy and, through him, Surrealists who had fled Nazi-occupied France. One of these was Max Ernst, who visited her studio in 1942 to help his wife, Peggy Guggenheim, select works for her “31 Women” exhibition.
The painting on Tanning’s easel during that visit was Birthday (1942), a self-portrait of a half-nude Tanning opening a door that exposes an endless hallway of semi-open doors; it was ultimately chosen to participate in Guggenheim’s exhibition. Tanning and Ernst started a relationship and were together for 34 years, marrying in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browner in 1946 after Ernst’s divorce from Guggenheim earlier that year.
Tanning remained interested in the illogical and the impossible throughout her career, painting Surrealist themes such as the femme-enfant (woman-child) and the game of chess. Endgame (1944) shows a white satin shoe stomping a bishop on a checked board, with a trompe l’oeil scene of Arizona (where she and Ernst spent summers) at the bottom. “Anything that is ordinary and frequent is uninteresting to me, so I have to go in a solitary and risky direction,” Tanning once told an interviewer. “If it strikes you as being enigmatic, well, I suppose that’s what I wanted it to do.”
Rita Kernn-Larsen
One of the few women active in the international Surrealist movement during its heyday, Rita Kernn-Larsen was born in Denmark and was part of the Danish Surrealist circle in the 1930s. She exhibited her paintings—saturated with memories, imaginary objects, and parts of dreams—with the Surrealists in 1935 in Copenhagen, Oslo, the Swedish city of Lund, and London, and at the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibitionin Paris.
Peggy Guggenheim met Kernn-Larsen in Paris and gave her a solo show at her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London in 1938. Among the 36 paintings in the exhibition was Know Thyself (1937), a red-tinted self-portrait in which the artist explores the femme-arbre (woman-tree) theme as a stem sprouts branches with leaves that look like women’s lips. Kernn-Larsen made her own frames for many of the paintings in the exhibition, such as one with an extended wooden stake that was stuck into a flowerpot.
The outbreak of World War II shortly after her solo show forced the artist to stay in London, where she got to know the British Surrealists and participated in other Surrealist exhibitions. After the war she turned increasingly toward abstraction, creating works based on nature and experimenting with ceramics and collage.
Ithell Colquhoun
Ithell Colquhoun was an occultist who had a brief fling with the British Surrealists in the 1930s, enthusiastically adopting their automatism technique before formally severing ties with them in 1940. Mostly living in the United Kingdom, Colquhoun became aware of the Surrealists while briefly in Paris in the early 1930s. Back in London, she went to see the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries and attended a related lecture by Salvador Dalí (where, notoriously, he nearly suffocated while wearing a diving suit).
She became interested in what Dalí called his paranoiac-critical method of painting highly realistic scenes imbued with ambiguity, and she soon started exaggerating the human qualities of her botanical works. Her painting Scylla (1938) could be seen as rock formations in a body of water, or alternatively as a self-portrait of Colquhoun’s own legs and lower torso in a bath with rocks standing in for her thighs and seaweed as her pubic triangle. The title refers to a mythical Greek monster that lived in a narrow channel of water and fed on sailors passing through.
Colquhoun had a joint show with Roland Penrose at London’s Mayor Gallery in 1939, showing 14 oil paintings and two carved objects, but the following year she ended her formal association with the British Surrealists so she would have more time to pursue her interest in the occult. Colquhoun continued to use the automatism technique and said she felt like a Surrealist for the rest of her life.
Remedios Varo
In intimate and imaginative paintings that portray an alternate reality with the painstaking exactitude of a miniaturist, Spanish-born Remedios Varo created an idiosyncratic realm. In Varo’s world, animals, plants, humans, and mechanical objects were all interconnected. Every figure had the artist’s signature physical features—a heart-shaped face, long nose, thick hair, and big almond-shaped eyes. And she transferred her images from one surface to another using the decalcomania decorative technique adopted by the Surrealists, wherein ink or paint is spread on a surface and then pressed with aluminum foil or paper to create patterns.
Varo became part of the Surrealist circle after she moved from Spain to Paris in 1937 and began exhibiting with them. While she and the Surrealists shared an interest in connecting the animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds, she carefully planned her paintings rather than relying on automatism or leaving things to chance. “Sometimes I participated with works in their exhibitions; my position was one of a timid and humble listener,” Varo said in a 1957 interview about her time with the Surrealists in Paris. “I was together with them because I felt a certain affinity. Today I do not belong to any group; I paint what occurs to me and that is all.”
Varo fled France in 1941 before the Nazi invasion and moved to Mexico, where she befriended Leonora Carrington and other European Surrealist refugees. It was there, too, that she formed an intimate relationship with the political exile Walter Gruen, whose emotional and financial support allowed her to pursue her art full time. Her most ambitious works were created between her marriage to Gruen in 1953 and her death, at age 54, in 1963.
Kay Sage
American-born artist Kay Sage used landscapes as visual metaphors for states of mind and spirit, in neutral-toned panoramas reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico. Known mostly as a painter, though she was also a published poet, Sage spent her early career in Italy and France. Her landscapes are usually bare and represent space that is inspired more by imagination than by nature, populated with unfinished buildings. In Tomorrow Is Never (1955), towering scaffolds emerge from nebulous clouds and surround indiscernible draped structures.
After studying art in Washington, D.C., and Rome, Sage moved to Paris in 1937, where she met several artists in the Surrealist circle. When World War II broke out she moved to New York with her partner, the Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, and helped arrange passage to the United States for Breton and others. She and Tanguy ultimately married in Las Vegas and settled in Woodbury, Connecticut, where she had her most productive years, exhibiting her work and organizing exhibitions for French Surrealists.
Lee Miller
American-born photographer Lee Miller began her career in front of the camera as a Vogue model. Within a decade she took her first self-portrait (published in Vogue’s September 1930 issue), which foreshadowed the ways this inventive photographer would bring her eye for the unexpected to the black-and-white frame. One of the photographers she posed for at Vogue was Edward Steichen, who suggested she study with Man Ray.
Miller moved to Paris in 1929, where she was Man Ray’s student and studio assistant (as well as lover and muse), and part of a modernist circle of artists. Together she and Man Ray invented the “solarization” technique by which black and white are reversed—discovered, Miller said, when she accidentally turned the lights on while developing a photograph. Miller modeled for the Surrealist photographer too, in a way: It is her eye that floats at the tip of the metronome pendulum in Ray’s Indestructible Object (1923). During her time with Man Ray, she continued to take photographs; after leaving Man Ray in 1932, Miller returned to New York to open her own studio.
In 1934 Miller married Aziz Eloui Bey and moved with him to Cairo, all the while taking solo trips to Paris. On one of these trips she met atist Roland Penrose; she moved to London in 1939, in part to pursue a relationship with him. As World War II had just broken out and British Vogue lost staff members to the war effort, Miller was hired as a photographer and brought her Surrealist background and imagination to her editorial duties. For a feature illustrating exercises, for example, she used double and triple exposures to show the arc of the movement in a single image. For a feature called “Hats Follow Suit” in late 1942, she turned headshots into playing cards with the help of the magazine’s art department, possibly inspired by Man Ray’s idea to create a Surrealist deck of cards. She also chose unusual settings for fashion photography, such as European buildings wrecked by aerial bombardments or the dinosaur skeletons in New York’s Museum of Natural History.
Alice Rahon
Equally inspired by prehistoric cave paintings and Surrealism, French-born painter Alice Rahon (born Alice Phillipot) addressed mythology, magic, and memory on her textured canvases. Known mostly for her poetry when she moved in artistic circles in 1920s Paris, Rahon—along with her husband at the time, artist Wolfgang Paalen—became became part of Breton’s Surrealist set and was active with the group throughout the 1930s.
Rahon met Frida Kahlo when the latter came to Paris in 1939, and Kahlo invited her, Paalen, and their friend photographer Eva Sulzer, to visit her in Mexico City. With the outbreak of World War II, the Paalens decided to stay in Mexico permanently, and it was there that Rahon started painting. She joined the local Surrealist circle that included Carrington and Varo, and after publishing her final book of poetry in 1941 she dedicated herself completely to painting. In 1946, she became a Mexican citizen, and in 1947 she divorced Paalen and renamed herself Alice Rahon.
Rahon’s style was figurative, and she used odd materials such as iron wire, string, volcanic rock, sand, crayons, gouache, ink, and found objects like butterfly wings and feathers. She would create sandpaper-like textures on her canvas surfaces and then etch on them using a sgraffito technique, exposing underlying layers. She had a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1945 and also showed her work at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. “The Invisible speaks to us, and the world it paints takes the form of apparitions,” she once commented. “It awakens in each of us that yearning for the marvelous and shows us the way back to it.”
Valentine Hugo
A hand in a brown glove unnervingly pokes one finger under the edge of a white glove holding a die in Object (1931), an assemblage Valentine Hugo made around the time she was active at the Parisian Bureau of Surrealist Research. This was where she began making Surrealist objects, though she’d been a working artist for years already by that point, mostly creating fashion illustrations and designing masks and costumes for the Ballets Russe, theater productions, and costume balls.
Hugo showed Object at the 1933 Exposition Surréaliste in Paris and also participated in the 1936 “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” show at MoMA, exhibiting a few oil paintings (including portraits that she painted from memory of Surrealist poets Eluard, Breton, Tristan Tzara, René Crevel, Benjamin Péret, and René Char). Working across collage-paintings, drypoint etchings, and lithographs, she illustrated several Surrealist texts between 1933 and 37. Part of the Surrealist inner circle, she also played the popular Surrealist game exquisite corpse with Breton and others such as Eluard, Tzara, and Greta Knutson—with some of the resulting drawings being exhibited as standalone artworks at the 1936 MoMA exhibition.
In the 1940s, however, Hugo left the Surrealists behind, returning to book illustrations and costume and set designs for theater.
Jacqueline Lamba
If Surrealism tended to reduce women to fine-looking muses, then nobody paid the price quite like talented and strikingly beautiful Jacqueline Lamba. Even she knew she was too attractive for her own good. “If I had been less beautiful,” she said to art historian Martica Sawin while in her 70s, “I would have been a better painter.”
The French-born Lamba wasn’t always a painter; after attending the Ecole de l’Union Centrale des Arts Decoratifs from 1926 to 1929, she began her career designing books, advertising, textiles, and paper for big retailers. It was only then that she began to paint.
Lamba started reading Breton’s writings in 1934 and found a way to “accidentally” meet him at a café that year; they married less than three months later. (Eluard and Alberto Giacometti were their witnesses, no family was present, and photos were taken by Man Ray, who photographed Lamba nude with Eluard and Giacometti as a nod to Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.) Their relationship was difficult from the start, and Lamba felt that Breton minimized her need to paint. Nonetheless she was included in Surrealist decalcomanias and exquisite corpse games, and she exhibited with the group in 1935 and in 1936, when two of her objects and the painting Les Heures (1935)—an oval canvas with an anthropomorphic conch shell alone in a dark body of water—were shown in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. Lamba also showed at the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1938 in Paris and in the first postwar Surrealist show, “La Surréalisme en 1947,” at Paris’s Galerie Maeght, but by then she’d lost interest in the movement.
Lamba is less well-known than other women Surrealists, partially because her standing as Breton’s wife often overshadowed her work; moreover, little of her early work remains. Everything she stored in their Rue Fontaine apartment in Paris when she and Breton fled during the war was gone by the time she returned in 1954. She also destroyed many of her Surrealist works herself.
Elsa Schiaparelli
Fashion was where Surrealists could render the body nonsensical in the real world, and Italian-born couturier Elsa Schiaparelli did it best. Known familiarly as Schiap, the designer did playfully bizarre things with clothes—she added claws to the fingertips of gloves and hands to belts, among other interventions. She also collaborated with many Surrealists, whom she met through her friend Gaby Picabia, wife of the avant-garde French painter Francis Picabia.
One of the first of her artist collaborations was in 1936 with Dalí, who showed her a drawing of a woman wearing a suit that had drawers where there should have been pockets. Schiaparelli took that idea and made a series of navy-blue velvet suits and coats that looked like they had drawers, complete with black plastic knobs, as part of her winter 1936–37 haute couture collection. That same year, Meret Oppenheim designed a bangle bracelet covered in fur for Schiaparelli (a forerunner of Oppenheim’s more famous fur-lined teacup), and in 1937 Leonor Fini designed a torso-shaped bottle for a Schiaparelli perfume called Shocking (allegedly using Mae West’s body as inspiration).
Schiaparelli’s designs were strange but also highly wearable, a difficult balance to achieve. Her Shoe Hat (1937), a headpiece that looked like an upside-down high-heeled shoe, was made of felt and velvet and easy to wear. The Skeleton Dress (1938) that she designed in collaboration with Dalí had distinctive raised ribs, spine, and pelvis, made from trapunto quilting laid atop a floor-length crepe sheath.
Claude Cahun
Possible realities are endless in the photographs, photomontages, performances, and writings of French-born Claude Cahun (née Lucy Schwob). Active mostly in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s, she made photographic portraits and self-portraits that often included split and doubled images, mirrors, and gender ambiguity. (She herself, as her pseudonym implies, was gender-fluid.) Cahun also made what she called photographic “paintings”—miniature worlds or still lifes made from assembled objects, then photographed.
Cahun became associated with the Surrealists in the 1930s and signed many of their collective declarations, but she was never formally a member. She did participate in a few Surrealist exhibitions, including “Exposition Surréaliste d’Objets” in 1936. For that show she wrote an essay titled “Beware of Domestic Objects” that instructed, “You should discover, handle, tame, make irrational objects yourself.” She also contributed a tennis ball painted to look like an eyeball and covered with curly hair.
She and her lifelong partner Suzanne Malherbe, who used the name Marcel Moore professionally, collaborated often, including on the photomontages used to illustrate Cahun’s 1930 book of autobiographical poems and dreams, Aveux non Avenus. In 1939 the couple moved from Paris to Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, to escape persecution as Jews. There they made political photomontages and were active in the French Resistance, which led to their 1944 arrest and imprisonment until the end of the war.
