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The Surreal World: Exhibits highlights masters, but where are the women?
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| Soni Martin |
October 15, 2003 |
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Not one, but two exhibits in Fayetteville highlight the works of Surrealism masters of the twentieth century. Each gallery's approach is different in the way they chose to celebrate the manifestations of Surrealism.
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Surrealism Visions at the Fayetteville Museum of Art is a very informative overview of the early Surrealists artists between World War I and World II. It is an interesting and educational exhibit with text references about important ideas and techniques which were being explored during the early years of the movement.
I left the museum pleased that so many, if not all, of the major male artists were represented, yet disappointed that the exhibit included only one female - Meret Oppenheim. I didn't even think about the lack of women being represented while viewing the exhibit and I certainly didn't go around counting. It didn't occur to me that female surrealist artists were left out of the museum's exhibit until much later, after I visited the exhibit at Gallery 208, Salvador Dali: The Divine Comedy. While viewing Dali's exhibit I started to reflect on the way women were being represented. Then it occurred to me that important female Surrealists have been, again, left out of the way art history is presented.
This is about the time many people get impatient when anyone drives home the point about discrimination, but I cannot in good conscience, not point out important points that are relevant to the Surrealist movement, those who participated, and the way in which museums are often exclusive instead of inclusive.
Here is a list of possible reason why anyone would try and justify why women may have been excluded in Surrealism Visions or for any exhibit. It's a private collection by an individual or corporation; or the exhibit focuses on a time period, locale or culture.
In either case, the museum could have taken a leadership role in presenting the whole picture - even if the exhibit is a traveling exhibit or a private collection. Since educational texts were included in the exhibit, the museum could have mentioned significant female Surrealists and their approach to similar subjects. Secondly, they have male artists represented from 1920 to the late 1960's and there are many female Surrealists who are significant in the early period as well as the later period in the movement.
If we go back to the initial ideas of Surrealism, it's 1924 and Andre Breton has defined Surrealism in his Surrealism Manifesto as "pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation." In short, he and the other Surrealists artists were influenced by Sigmund Freud and his new approach to psychoanalysis: the unconscious exists and can reveal meaningful feelings by a slip of the tongue (Freudian slip); dream imagery reveal hidden desires; and that "sexual drive was the most powerful shaper of a person's psychology."
Andre Benton and the other Surrealist artists of the 1920s and '30s explored the direct expression of the unconscious through their art by automatic writing, creating hallucinatory worlds on paper or canvas in which the idea of the rational is not present.
The Fayetteville Museum's of Art exhibit is a print show with light-hearted themes which follow the style of Surrealism. Yet if you look at the paintings of those same male Surrealist artists, many of their works are riddled with controlled violence and brutality against women. Women were important to the early Surrealists, but not as artists. To the male Surrealists women were only valued as muses, lovers, and the femme-enfant (the Surrealist idea of the child-women).
The exhibit at Gallery 208 at Up and Coming Weekly Headquarters is Salvador Dali: The Divine Comedy. This exhibit is a series of lithographs depicting Dante's Divine Comedy and is part of a series which totals100 prints. Dali's deft hand for drawing and creativity is acute in this exhibit. His dreamlike perception of space and the Surrealist techniques of automatic and spontaneous marks are evident. In true Dali style, he includes his dream inspired symbols of women as sexual. Dali, like many of his male Surrealists counterparts, often represent women as simply sexual creatures.
All of this is relevant. Female Surrealists, which were excluded from the museum's exhibit, took an entirely different approach to representing women. Their imagery frequently incorporated the same dreamlike landscape or interior as their male counterparts, but they represented themselves as dominant figures who controlled their environment. Even when female Surrealists represented themselves as sexually charged, they were not objects of desire created for the male gaze. Instead of sexual objectification, the work of many female Surrealists was about sexual transformation and self empowerment.
I encourage everyone to see the Surrealist exhibits at the Fayetteville Museum of Art and Gallery 208, but you will have to go online or to a library to see the work of the female Surrealists. A short list would include Leonor Fini, Remedios Varo, Meret Oppenheim, Eileen Agar, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning.
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