The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists

Surrealism began with poet Andre Breton's belief that the limitations of rationality and of fixed categories of meaning could be overcome through a new syntheses of the conscious and unconscious, dream and waking.It was a new path was aimed at liberating the dream and the conscious as creative forces.

Women artists adapted surrealism to new, cultural and personal situations.They sought to establish links between the movement's focus on using chance, dreams and the erotic as creative stimuli and contemporary artistic practices.

Surrealists sought new ways of expressing irrationality associated with economic depression and war in works of art that rejected earlier models of realism and abstraction.Artists like Louise Bourgeoise never considered herself a surrealist yet her works displayed the influence of surrealist ideas about corporeal metamorphosis,the disquieting power of the object and the relationship between nature and culture.

As Whitney Chadwick succinctly put it in her groundbreaking Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement,"Surrealism offered many women their first glimpse of a world in which creative activity and liberation from family imposed social expectations might coexist, one in which rebellion was viewed as a virtue,imagination as a passport to more liberated life."

How does surrealism by male artists differ from surrealism by their female counterparts?

1.Brenton accorded erotic desire and psychoanalytic principles of male psychosexual development are redirected to the production of iconographies of the feminine unconscious as is manifested in dreams, automatic writing and the erotic.

2.The male surrealists embrace of the radical often aggressive interventions into the materiality of objects becomes an extended exploration of the body as perceived from within rather than an assault on the body from without.

3. Women artists made surrealism something uniquely their own.The surrealist cultivation of rupture and disruption becomes, in the hands of many women artists , a means to the formation of new narrative structures that explore the sources of women's knowledge and power through their relationships to nature and culture to animal and human and to the psychic avatar and the spirit guide.

4. Women were the agency by which male surrealists created.Although their ideology was revolutionary in its challenge of the established social institutions of church, marriage and family, male surrealists were misogynists in their denial of woman's ability to create art.The female often began as wives, lovers of a circle of men around Brenton and his followers(Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington,Kay Sage, Remidios Varo, Alice Rahon)Surrealism granted these women a freedom that no previous aesthetic had offered.Yet for many of them, their development flourished only after they were physically distant from Paris and its art circles.The female surrealists ignored proscribed societal limitations traveling conceptually as well as geographically to explore new worlds.