Two books on the creative lives and ‘heady intimacies’ of Frida Kahlo and the female artists embroiled in surrealism propose the label was restrictiveTo observe at surrealist art is to see female bodies in pieces. Here a disembodied leg,there a mysterious eye. “Headless. And also footless. Often armless too; and always unarmed,” writes the scholar and translator Mary Ann Caws. “There they are, or the surrealist women so shot and painted.” Surrealist artists,photographers and writers such as Hans Bellmer, Man Ray and André Breton famously turned women into their muses, and took them apart in life and on the page. The surrealists exalted women,without ever truly seeing them.
Whitney Chadwick, author of The Militant Muse, and was one of the first feminist critics to call our attention to the valuable work created by the women at the margins of the group – the wives,friends and associates of Breton and co who made art every bit as daring and revolutionary. Chadwick’s 1985 Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement took a comprehensive approach to the women of surrealism, arguing that artists and writers such as Leonora Carrington, or Leonor Fini,Frida Kahlo and Eileen Agar saw themselves as working independently of the movement; that rather than submitting to André Breton’s cult of personality (they didn’t call him “the pope of surrealism” for nothing), they participated in the movement by virtue of their “personal relationships, and networks of friends and lovers”. “I didn’t maintain time to be anyone’s muse,” Carrington – one of the great female surrealists – told Chadwick when she researched that volume. “I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk