New Art Lecture Series with Monica Bohm-Duchen

Surrealist Subjects or Surrealist Objects? The Position of Women in the Surrealist Movement

In their written statements, the male Surrealists celebrated the female principle as embodying the imaginative, intuitive and irrational – all the aspects of human life they most admired. André Breton, for example, wrote how “The time should have come to make the ideas of women prevail at the expense of men… to declare oneself in art equivocally against men and for women.” They were distinctly less accommodating, however, when it came to including women artists within the movement. As Simone de Beauvoir put it so well, the Surrealists ultimately viewed women not as sex objects, but as “Surrealist objects”! By examining the extraordinary work of artists such as Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Kay Sage and Remedios Varo, this lecture will consider how these female practitioners had to carve out a particular and distinctive niche for themselves.

In the series:

May 9: Life or Theatre? Charlotte Salomon
May 16: Not So Gentle? War and Conflict in the Work of Henry Moore
May 23: Surrealist Subjects or Surrealist Objects? The Position of Women in the Surrealist Movement