Kevin Jackson
Surrealists were often influenced by the Occult, despite André Breton's protestaions
Surrealism, though the reference books do not always tell you this, was often profoundly informed by the occult. André Breton, the movement’s leader, may have thundered against it from time to time, but the other leading surrealists were passionate students of the western esoteric tradition. This penchant for the magical and mystical was, if anything, even stronger in the British wing of surrealism, most spectacularly in the case of Ithell Colquhoun, who was not merely an artist but a proper, practising witch. (For more on surrealism, see Hermione Eyre, p71)
Colquhoun and her cohorts are being given their place in the sun once more by this exhibition at Tate St Ives, subtitled “Magic and Modernity in British Art.” The modernity side will be familiar enough—works by Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth; it’s the magic that will be the novelty. Expect plenty of menhirs and stone circles, ley lines and geomantic patterns—but also to find out, for instance, how Derek Jarman was a follower of Dee and Paracelsus as well as an angry gay polemicist. And for those who care for such things, there is a Damien Hirst piece in untypically whimsical mode: a vitrine display, featuring not a shark or sliced cow but a cute unicorn.
The Dark Monarch
Tate St Ives, 10th-October-10th January 2010, Tel: 01736 796 226,
www.tate.org.uk/stives
Hermione Eyre
Above: Dora Maar, Sans Titre, 1934, photomontage–a woman famous as Picasso’s muse, but not as an artist in her own right
Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism
26th September to 10th January 2010, Manchester Art Gallery
Women are often the subjects of surrealist art: dismembered, deliquescent, with doors in their stomachs, breasts for eyes and so forth. More elusive, however, are women as proponents of surrealist art. Lee Miller and Frida Kahlo are the star names; general surveys of the movement also tend to include a few individual works by women–Meret Oppenheim’s Object (a teacup, saucer and spoon covered in fur, 1936), Leonora Carrington’s shock-haired Self-Portrait (1938) with rocking horse and Eileen Agar’s sculpture of a scarf-shrouded head, Angel of Anarchy (1936-40). But, as a new exhibition in Manchester shows, there are many more heroines of surrealism who have been sidelined from the canon.
The alpha males of surrealism are among the best-known names in 20th-century art: André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Joan Miró. So why haven’t we heard of Emmy Bridgewater, whose influence on the British movement was—according to the French critic Michel Remy—as powerful as Dalí’s in France? Search for her name in the British Library and there is only one return, a flimsy exhibition catalogue. And why haven’t we heard of the devoted lesbian stepsisters of Jersey, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore? They fought the Nazi occupation of the island with a campaign of subversive propaganda, some of it in rhyme. Yet instead of getting the Hollywood biopic they clearly deserve, they tend to be discussed only in journals of gender studies.
The 33 women artists in this exhibition remain in relative obscurity for many reasons. Lack of original talent is not one of them. Critical carping is. To research women Surrealists is to encounter either silence or polite derision from the art establishment. The last major international show to group these contemporaries together was in 1943, at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery in New York. It proved, according to one critic, that women were better at surrealism than men. Really? Be still, my beating heart. “This is logical now one comes to think of it,” the critic continues, “since surrealism is about 70 per cent hysterics…”
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