“The Problem of Woman” in Surrealism

“The Problem of Woman” in Surrealism Kate Conley (bio) and Alyce Mahon (bio) André Breton’s footnote in the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” (1930) stating that the “problem of woman is the most wonderful [merveilleux] and disturbing problem there is in the world” has often been read as implying that woman was an abstract concept for the surrealist movement, and that women artists were not recognized as active participants.1 Breton’s words seem to put woman on a pedestal rather than in the collective. Yet the word “wonderful” was a revealing choice of adjective: it denotes something (person or object or experience) that is strange, curious, or astonishing, as well as an agency to excite or inspire those responses. The French word merveilleux (marvelous) was a metaphysical concept central to the surrealist discourse— explained by Pierre Mabille as following “the paths of the world and those leading to the hidden center of the self at the same time.”2 Women were present in Surrealism and in this pursuit of the marvelous from the start, beginning with Mademoiselle Renée at the third session of surrealist automatism conducted in Breton’s Paris apartment, who fell asleep and called out “breathless phrases” about “the abyss,” and his wife Simone Kahn Breton, who described these sessions in her letters to her cousin, Denise, and who is shown at [End Page v] a typewriter in the famous 1924 photograph of the group by Man Ray.3 Women were active in producing the group “exquisite corpse” drawings that began at a dinner table in 1925, including Valentine Hugo and Nusch Eluard. Claude Cahun had published some of her subversive short stories, “Heroines” in the Mercure de France and Journal littéraire in 1925, and in 1930 her only published self-portrait, titled Frontière humaine (Human Frontier), was published in the journal Bifur.4 Cahun and her partner Marcel Moore would also join Breton in the anti-fascist political effort, Contreattaque, in 1935. By the mid-1930s, multiple women were involved in Surrealism: among others, Meret Oppenheim, from Switzerland, once she moved to Paris in 1932–33; Leonor Fini, from Argentina and later Italy, who first met Breton in 1933; Breton’s second wife, French painter Jacqueline Lamba in 1934; Gisèle Prassinos, born in Istanbul of Greek heritage and raised in France, whose automatic writings as a teenager attracted the attention of Paul Éluard in 1934; Leonora Carrington and Kay Sage, from England and the United States, who joined the group once they arrived in Paris in 1937; Frida Kahlo, from Mexico, who had an exhibition in Paris in 1938 and participated in the 1940 international exhibition of Surrealism in Mexico City; Dorothea Tanning, from the United States, who joined the group in New York City in 1942; Toyen, who launched a sur-realist movement in Prague and moved to Paris in 1947–48; Joyce Mansour, an English born Egyptian poet, who joined the surrealist circle in Paris after the publication of her first poetry collection Cris in 1954; and Canadian painter Mimi Parent who was entrusted by Breton and fellow surrealists to design the Exposition InteRnatiOnal du Surréalisme (EROS) in Paris in 1959.5 Women clearly responded fully to the calls across the three Manifestoes of Surrealism of 1924–42 to become sur-realists by pursuing automatism, occultism, and new mythologies but without total allegiance to any one definition of the term. Sometimes all it took was a look to turn them toward this new world view—Tanning describes how the 1936 “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” exhibition in New York at the Museum of Modern Art left her “rocking” [End Page vi] on her “run-over heels” from the “explosion” of discovering “inside an innocuous concrete building . . . the limitless expanse of POSSIBILITY.”6 She felt it was an inclusive forum, as she wrote in her first autobiography, Birthday, with a reference to Plato’s Symposium of talkative philosophers: “You needn’t make excuses for putting on a banquet and inviting one and all.”7 Women brought a broader internationalism to Surrealism, helping to expand its global reach as well as re-orientate its formal experimentation, socio-political concerns, and advance...