Penn State University Press The Journal of General Education
Penn State University Press The Journal of General Education
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Journal of General Education
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ART HISTORY AND THE CASE
FOR THE
WOMEN OF SURREALISM
casa de la luna
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3 2 THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL EDUCATION
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WOMEN OF SURREALISM 33
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34 THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL EDUCATION
How many female poets and artists accepted the evaluation of their
role that relegated them to the subordinate position of "surrealist ob
ject" rather than that of creator of "surrealist objects"? To
what extent does the avant-garde life-style mitigate against the oppor
tunity for women to demand the right to artistic creation for them
selves as well as the right to the artist's life-style?
In The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir criticizes Breton's ideal
of reciprocal love because it does not bring up the question of
woman's private destiny apart from that of man. She makes the ob
servation that for the surrealists, woman did not represent the conven
tional "sex object" but rather the more unconventional "surrealist
object." She says: "This unique woman, at once carnal and ar
tificial, natural and human, casts the same spell as the equivocal ob
jects dear to the Surrealists: she is the spoon-shoe, the table-wolf, the
marble-sugar that the poet finds at the flea market or invents in a
dream; she shares in the secret of familiar objects suddenly revealed
in their true nature, and in the secret of plants and stones: she is all
things."7
This brings us to a consideration of Apollinaire's The Breasts of
Tiresias, the pre-surrealist drama for which the term "Surr?aliste"
was originally coined. Here is the prototype of the reverse of the
W?man-Child as it relates to Surrealism. Th?r?se, the protagonist,
after renouncing the role of child-bearer and housewife and
proclaiming that she is a Feminist, is magically transformed into
Tiresias the Seer. Although this appears ridiculous and farcical
because of its humorous exaggerations, Th?r?se can actually prefigure
that new surrealist feminist heroine who proves that once woman has
renounced all stereotypes, has gained autonomy and independence,
she actually acquires psychic powers and becomes a clairvoyant. In
other words, in abandoning her "feminine" role, the loss of the
special and unique ability to be in touch with other realms of exis
tence which was thought to be specific to women like the Femme-En
fant does not occur. On the contrary, woman's psychic powers are
actually enhanced when she is not defined according to her sex-role
identity.
It is against this background that we can more readily appreciate why
the subject matter of the paintings by the Women of Surrealism is large
ly dominated by the theme of Woman as Subject rather than as Object.
Surrealist women, as I discovered, have long been involved in a search
for a definition of their own nature and have been probing the symbol
ism related to the Feminine Archetype in order to postulate the at
tributes of this emerging identity: Woman as Goddess, Woman as the
Great Mother, as the Alchemist, as the Scientist, as the Spinner and
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WOMEN OF SURREALISM 35
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36 THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL EDUCATION
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WOMEN OF SURREALISM 37
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38 THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL EDUCATION
I felt that through the agency of the sun I was an androgyne, the
moon, the Holy Ghost, a gypsy, an acrobat, Leonora Carrington
and a woman. I was also destined to be, later, Elizabeth of
England. I was she who revealed religions and bore on her
shoulders the freedom and the sins of the earth changed into
knowledge, the union of Man and Woman with God and the
Cosmos, all equal between them. . . . The son was the Sun and I
the Moon, an essential element of the Trinity with the microscopic
knowledge of the earth, its plants and creatures. I knew that Christ
was dead and done for and that I had to take His place, because the
Trinity minus a woman and microscopic knowledge had become
dry and incomplete. Christ was replaced by the Sun. I was Christ
on earth in the person of the Holy Ghost.1'*
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WOMEN OF SURREALISM 39
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40 THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL EDUCATION
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WOMEN OF SURREALISM 41
located in the psychic center. This lotus, seemingly located below the
heart, must correspond to the lotus known as the "island of
jewels."24 This is the center of consciousness-energy according to
Tantrism. Leonora Carrington has been initiated into Tibetan Tan
trism by the Tibetan Lama Rimpoche. The bowl might represent the
Grail that received the blood of Christ. The salamander in the bowl
represents the element of fire in alchemy?the agent of transmutation.
Leonora Carrington has also created the image of the woman as
alchemist in an unpublished novel. Here the woman alchemist corre
sponds to the archetype of the Wise Old Woman. She says: "I am
Nanny, an Artisan, an old woman and a midwife." She is asked
whether she can hear and see everything and she replies:
Yes, I can hear many things and my eyes have become sharp.
Even the life beating inside a stone is audible to me and that is a
gift, it is also a life or lives of labour. ... I have trained all the
love in my body into energy and all my hate, which is also a
great force, I have trained into thought. My womb is no larger
than a grain of rice because its power has all been used in dis
covery. I say discovery because creation is the finding of some
thing which has always existed, existed in a different form or
forms, but nevertheless already there, whole or in small pieces,
waiting to come into being.25
Soon the instrument was filled and flowing with quicksilver and
not only could they hear the silent song it made but they also
heard the invisible life of the dolls and their voices. They could
feel and touch the sensations of the mannikins although to the
sharpest ear in the world not a sound could be heard in the
kitchen-laboratory. Amagoya could now understand the voice of
the Artisan as she spoke to the ivory dolls by medium of the
mobile quicksilver. "Mercury speaks to Ivory: hear me, I am the
Artisan but I am also Mercury. My voice is human and mineral,
your two Ivory bodies are one whole body. Ivory the weapon,
Saturn, the body, hear me and speak."26
In Who Art Thou, White Face a chimera or fantastic being has just
laid an egg. The being's black sun face is located in its solar plexus,
which represents the essential self. The egg is the world egg, a new birth
and the philosophers' stone.
In Lepidopterus or The Butterfly People Eating a Meal the artist in
forms us that the black swans are suggested by the refrain of an ancient
song of the bards: "I am the Black Swan, Queen of them all." Their
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42 THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL EDUCATION
food is red, for Britons of the Stone Age painted food for the dead red.
The black swan is also the sacred sign of the Goddess of the old Ma
triarchal Religion. The swan is being fed food for the dead because the
Old Religion has been buried, but by eating this food, the religion of the
Goddess is being revived. The black swan is also equivalent to the black
sun. Alchemically the stage of blackness known as the "crow's
head" or the "black earth," when boiled, becomes known as the
"swan." It finally results in the production of the philosophers'
stone. The Butterfly People represent possibilities of psychic metamor
phosis.
The Godmother is directly inspired by the nursery rhyme "Goosey
Goosey Gander, whither dost thou wander?" The query immedi
ately opens the door to speculation about the nature of the worlds we in
habit. Suddenly the invisible becomes manifest. The central being with
the invisible face shows no differentiation between the five senses. Ac
cording to the artist it also contains the sixth and the seventh. It is blue
for the planet Earth (The Blue Planet) and for the sky. It is
"Baraka" the life-essence and Prana. Anti-Being is contrasted with
being in the image of the beasts chasing each other in the endless karmic
circle around the being whose black monkey face is the black sun. In
order to reach illumination, one must see through the black sun. This
symbolism parallels the alchemical imagery of transforming black
primal matter (the Nigredo) to gold.27
Her Women's Liberation Poster rejects the traditional biblical in
terpretation of Eve as born of Adam, because woman's procreative
powers are denied by a myth that renders her subordinate and inferior
to man. It depicts the rising of the new woman or the Goddess resur
rected. She is identified with the power pf the serpent or the concept
of Kundalini. Through Yoga this power or energy rises up through the
chakras of the body until it reaches the third eye corresponding to illu
mination. The poster is green for the Emerald Tablets of Hermes. The
interior or psychic evolution of the new Eve is analogous to a kind of in
terior psychic alchemy.
The Compassionate Tree can be related to the Egyptian Date
Palm Goddess dispensing nourishment. In Egyptian art it is the Tree
Goddess who gives birth to the Sun-Child. It is linked with the rites of
harvest in which women are intimately connected to the lunar cycle.
The female imagery is obvious in the comparison between the woman
as childbearer and the compassionate palm tree. Woman and tree also
represent the Great Earth Mother as examples of fecundity and fertil
ity.
Nine Nine Nine is the title of another painting. It symbolizes the
triangle of the ternary, the triplication of the triple, and incarnates an
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WOMEN OF SURREALISM 43
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44 THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL EDUCATION
that they spoke about her to Andr? Breton. She exhibited with the
surrealists Ernst, Dali, Magritte, Tanguy, Man Ray, and Mir? at the
Salon des Surind?pendents in Paris. In contrast to L?onor Fini, M?ret
Oppenheim regularly attended the meetings of the surrealists and
identified closely with them in her life-style and her art. In 1936 she
modeled for Man Ray, created the Fur-lined Teacup, and had her
first show in B?ie. In 1937 she returned to B?ie and experimented in
the creation of fantastic furniture, shoes, belts, and gloves. Some of
the humor of her earlier creations can be perceived in Ma Gouver
nante. Between 1944 and 1956 her artistic production declined, for
she went through the troubling period of self-doubt and questioning
that is familiar to many women artists. She was in her 30s, no longer
a Femme-Enfant. Little by little, through a careful Jungian analysis of
her dreams, her self-confidence returned and in 1958, at the age of
45, she began to paint, sculpt, and exhibit her works again. In
December 1959 she created the inaugural feast for the International
Exposition of Surrealism in Paris. She stresses that there are three
men and two women feasting upon the naked woman. The entire
scene was intended as a celebration of springtime or Easter?as a fer
tility rite, not as a cannibal feast, as it is so often labeled.
M?ret Oppenheim's story is exemplary for women, for it renews
our faith in the ability of the creative spirit to reemerge triumphant
after a period of introspective doubt. Her recent works are "Objets
Porteurs d'Id?e." According to Oppenheim, every idea comes to
the mind clothed in its own form. Since each new idea presents itself
in an entirely new form, it takes a certain amount of time for it to be
understood by the contemporary public. The concept of the "mul
tiple," according to Oppenheim, defeats the purposes of the
"Objet Porteur d'Id?e." The only time that the multiple would
be justified is when the concept of mass reproduction of the object is
inherent in the artist's original idea. This would be the case for sta
tuettes of gods and saints, and for her satire on her own legend in
which she made an edition of 120 fur-lined teacups and saucers.
Among her more recent works are Cloud on a Bridge, Libellule Cam
pofornio, Octavia, and The Old Serpent Nature. Concerning the last
work, when asked by Alain Jouffroy if her objects would have been
the same had she been a man, she replied:
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WOMEN OF SURREALISM 45
rolled around a bag of coal. His head is white. This summer (1973)
I read that many matriarchal Goddesses of the Orient were black
from the foot to the mouth. The head, starting from the mouth,
was white. The serpent is an attribute of matriarchal deities and in
general a symbol of the earth. In 1972 I did the painting The
Secret of Vegetation. A statue is hidden by sunlit leaves. On the
left and right two serpentine lines arise. When the work was
finished I looked at it and said to myself. That's curious. Until
now there was only one serpent in my paintings or sculptures. Why
these two serpents? I recalled those goddesses in clay (Cretan or
Minoan) that have their arms raised above their heads and hold in
each hand a serpent. But what do these serpents signify? Looking
at my work and seeing this sort of blue eye on top of the serpentine
on the left and the circular white light above the one on the right, it
occurred to me that it could be a question of those two currents of
energy that "fill" the universe?the positive and the negative,
life and death, the Yin and the Yang. The symbol of the spiral is
not unrelated to the serpent. Perhaps, in a more abstract way, it
signified eternity. "Two Birds," 1964 and "Spiral?Serpent in
Rectangle," 1973. Why is the serpent reappearing? Once, a
long time ago, it told Eve to give the apple from the Tree of
Knowledge to Adam. The Serpent Nature wanted man to follow
the path of intellectual development. Eve was then condemned
and the Serpent Nature along with her, by man. . . . Does the old
Serpent Nature want us to go in a new direction towards a stage in
which the intellect will be added to all that has been neglected for
so long in order to arrive at true wisdom at last?29
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46 THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL EDUCATION
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WOMEN OF SURREALISM 47
clock, the symbol of arriving late. The doctor is called FJA: Freud,
Jung, Adler.
Thus Remedios Varo joins the other Women of Surrealism in por
traying woman as alchemist, scientist, inventor, explorer and car
tographer of a world that intersects with our own in imperceptible
ways. She is in search of the lost key to explain the links between the
worlds which penetrate our own and those we have yet to discover.
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48 THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL EDUCATION
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WOMEN OF SURREALISM 49
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50 THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL EDUCATION
and defends the psychic center. She uses it to reconcile the duality of
energies, masculine and feminine. In a more humorous vein is her
Panic Candelabra.
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WOMEN OF SURREALISM 5 1
She spent her last life-cycle in Hungary, South America and Canada.
She is a painter and ceramicist and considers her art to be the reflec
tion from the edge of a knife. Her works deal with eroticism and
religion."38 She adds:
The Women of Surrealism have been excluded long enough from art
history. What are the chances of success, statistically speaking, for the
woman artist to receive recognition in America today? The Tamarind
Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, headed by June Wayne, has
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52 THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL EDUCATION
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WOMEN OF SURREALISM 5 3
Notes
1. Andr? Breton, Arcane 17 (Paris: Jeane-Jacques Pauvert) p. 62.
2. Ibid.
3. Fran?ois Mathey, Six Femmes Peintres (Paris: Les Editions du Ch?ne.
1951).
4. Walter Sparrow, Women Painters of the World (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1905).
5. Cindy Nemser, "Art Criticism and Women Artists," Journal of Aesthetic
Education 7 (July 1973): 79-80.
6. Ibid.
7. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Bantam), p. 219.
8. Constantin Jelenski, L?onor Fini (New York: Olympia Press, 1968).
9. Ibid.
10. Xavi?re Gauthier, L?onor Fini (Paris: Le Mus?e de Poche, 1971), p. 75.
(Translation by Gloria Orenstein)
11. Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (New York: Doubleday, 1957),
p. 72.
12. Ibid. p. 73.
13. Leonora Carrington, Down Below (Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1972).
14. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1955).
15. El mundo m?gico de los Mayas. Interpretaci?n de Leonora Carrington.
Textos de Andr?s Medina, Laurette S?journ? (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de
Antropolog?a, 1964).
16. A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology (Blauvelt, New York: Rudolph Steiner
Publications, 1974), p. 702.
17.Ibid.
18. J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (New York: Philosophical Library,
1962).
19. A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, p. 666.
20. Mouni Sadhu, The Tarot (No. Hollywood: Wilshire Book Co., 1962), p.
277.
21. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London:
Routledge and Kegan). (Summary of Text.)
22. A Dictionary of Symbols, pp. 180-81.
23. A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, p. 431.
24. Philip Rawson, Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy (New York: Avon
Books, 1973), p. 28.
25. Unpublished manuscript.
26. Ibid.
27. Interpretation suggested by the artist.
28. A Dictionary of Symbols, p. 223.
29. M?ret Oppenheim, Catalog, by Andr? Kamber (Museum der Stadt
Solothern. 8 Sept. bis 10 Nov. 1974).
30. Octavio Paz and Roger Callois, Remedios Varo (Mexico City: Ediciones
Era, 1966).
31. Dorothea Tanning, Catalog (Paris: Centre National d'Art Contemporain.
1974).
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
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54 THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL EDUCATION
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