Surrealist Women: An International Anthology
Edited and introduced by Penelope Rosemont
The Athlone Press
£19.99
0 485 300088 5
The immediate questions - what is a surrealist? Why does this anthology include only women? - are comprehensively answered in Penelope Rosemont's introduction. She defines a surrealist as one who
" (1) considers herself/himself a surrealist and/or
(2) is recognised as surrealist by surrealists and accepts being so designated, and
(3) takes part in surrealist activity by
producing work recognised by surrealists as a contribution to surrealism;
collaborating on surrealist periodicals;
participating in surrealist exhibitions;
publishing under the movement's "Surrealist Editions" imprint;
cosigning surrealist tracts;
taking part in Surrealist Group meetings, games, demonstrations, or other activities; and/or
otherwise publicly identifying herself/himself with the aims, principles, and activity of the Surrealist Movement."
The book, she writes, "refutes... the notion that surrealism is a static doctrine carved in stone in the 1920s". It takes us from the first women surrealists in 1924 to those working in the present day.
Why has Rosemont chosen to focus on women's activities to the exclusion of men's? This is not what is attempted: "my aim here is not to separate the sexes or to exclude men, but rather to include more women that have ever been included before in an anthology of surrealism", she writes, a tad disingenuously. She qualifies this, however, by saying that apart from in rare surrealist texts the women are almost always excluded from anthologies. For instance: Andre Breton, in Le Surrealisme et la Peinture of 1965, cites the work of half a dozen women. He is perforce the authority. Yet Professor S. Rubin, chief curator of the Painting and Sculpture collection at the New York Museum of Modern Art (and someone you could expect to know his onions), included in his Dada and Surrealist Art of 1968 only three women. They are mentioned in passing. None of them are the women that Breton invokes. We're not talking pamphlet here, either - it has 525 pages. Rosemont has many other toe curling examples.
She does not exclude men when they have translated the work of women in the book and she gives brief notes on seven male participants who are referred to in the collection. She quotes Ann Ethuin, who had asked her to specify "that her[Ethuin's] willingness to participate in the present anthology is based precisely on her recognition that the motivation behind this project is neither separatist nor otherwise hostile to surrealism."
Two-thirds of this collection have never been included in an anthology. Many of the writings have never been reprinted since their initial inking. Rosemont's claim to be addressing historical accuracy in this collection seems justified. That the work may be reintegrated, not reinserted, she insists on putting the women quoted into their historical context. We are given an overview of each period addressed and a brief biography of each participant - then left to see if the work stands.
The importance of surrealism to women is measured as well as the value of work done in the name of surrealism by women. The experience of surrealism, it is claimed, led to a "revolutionary challenge to dominant gender paradigms".
From the beginning, women were involved because of the emphasis on the non-rational. Women, one feels the male artists might have reasoned (though Rosemont does not say so), were more 'primitive', more in touch with the unconscious, more childlike, less sophisticated than men; epithets that would make us blaze nowadays, when 'intuitive' is a barely acceptable substitute. The fact remains that women were there because they were encouraged as dreamers and automatons; they stayed because the work they did worked; they were who they were mostly because they were the wives, girlfriends and intimate friends of the blokes.
Was there a knock on? How did the woman's work affect the man's, the man's the woman's? In the early days too much time has elapsed for us to know. Of one woman, 'Suzanne', nothing is known, not even her last name - except that she was the 'friend' of Roger Vitrac. Whether the women were freed up by being given the opportunity to write, to paint, in the spirit of experimentation and without judgement, or whether they were just waiting for the opportunity to be asked... the results are here. How they must have amazed the men!
"...a seagull seized the veil and took it to the secret cabin of a ship captain. He was an austere and passionate man with two favourite occupations: to inflict upon the cheeks of his men an inflation which he called 'hysterico-vernal' and to use poems specifically written for them in order to tame fishes caught in the bellies of sharks..."
This Surrealist Text appeared untitled in La Révolution Surréaliste no. 1 in December 1924 and is penned by Simone Kahn, born 1897. She studied philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne and was noted for her intelligence. And she was married to André Breton from 1921 to 1929. Then there was Renée Gauthier was associated with Benjamin Péret, one of surrealism's co founders; her rôle was as a "sleeper", a trance talker, and the only text known of hers is here. "You're wearing our uniform, but you're not a member of our congregation", she writes, tellingly. In the 1920's there were ten women active in surrealism and we have examples from them all except 'Suzanne', who has left no mark except her bare name.
The 1930 - 39 chapter, In The Service of Revolution, proffers the work of 22 women surrealists, a cluster of the more familiar names. Nancy Cunard and Valentine Penrose, already represented in Chapter one, are here developing; Gala Dali, Meret Oppenhiem, Toyen, Eileen Agar, Leonora Carrington are among those who pop up. The introduction to this epoch reveals the change in attitude to the freedom of women - following upon the Nozières and Papin murder trials it was assumed that women were a dangerous force that should be controlled. But by the end of this period Rosemount is convinced that the large number of women, some 53, involved in surrealism meant that they had chosen to be involved: indeed, "for the first time we find women in surrealism exploring questions of theory in a bold, rigorous and systematic manner". One such is Grace W. Pailthorpe. Her "The Scientific Aspect of Surrealism"(published in The London Bulletin in Dec.38/Jan. 39) concerns her study into psychological research. She writes, "Surrealism is a serious project. If followed wholeheartedly to its final goal it has the power to bring happiness to all humanity". Unfortunately - for surrealism - in her latter years Pailthorpe turned to Eastern Mysticism and her collection of surrealist art, apparently a large one, was left to a yoga group. They burnt it. What is the smell of surrealist works burning?
In this chapter we learn more of the views the women hold on surrealism, plus more surrealist texts; Hélène Vanel, of whom again little biographical information is known - she was a surrealist dancer and her life ended in the Nazi concentration camps - wrote memorably in her piece titled 'Indispensible Poetry' (1939) that "Dance is the vertigo of matter".
Ithell Colquhoun, Rosemont writes in her introduction, was
"A devoted explorer of decalcomania, fumage, frottage, collage and other methods of pictorial automatism... [she] invented several magic-inspired techniques of her own, including graphomania, stillomania, and parsemage."
Not only were women saying new things, they were finding new ways of saying them. Decalcomania was identified by Breton: Rosemont quotes his directions in chapter 4. He heads his instructions like a magic spell: "How a window may be opened at will on the loveliest landscape of this and other worlds":
"With a thick brush, spread black gouache on a sheet of shiny paper, diluting the paint here and there with water. Cover it at once with a similar sheet and press them fairly hard together with the hand. Then, by the upper edge, slowly lift this second sheet... ready to re-apply it and lift it again; repeat until it is almost dry. What you have before you is perhaps only the old paranoiac wall of da Vinci, but it is this wall carried to its own perfection."
Frumage originated with Wolfgang Paalen, and utilised candle smoke which was played with and fixed; Frottage was Max Ernst's speciality, where he took rubbings of surfaces and made them into pictures. Parsemage is like marbling but instead of skimming the surface of water floated with immiscible oils, charcoal or chalk dust is scattered. Graphomania and Stillomania are still a mystery to me. Not have I ascertained what Penelope Rosemont's Alchemigrams could be...pelicans rolling scarabs to leave gold traces, I hope.
The chapter concludes with a poem from Jeanne Megnen, written in 1941:
"...
Two of those pearls have nestled in my eyes
Two of those pearls have landed on a bird's wing.
I no longer see the overriding shiny domes.
Silence makes the ramparts desperately larger
The noise will start tomorrow".
The European war of 1939-1945 stopped the international collaboration previously enjoyed by surrealists. Nazi occupation caused its public display to end in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France. When the Germans hit Paris some of the group went to Marseilles and thence to exile; some to New York, others to Mexico and the Caribbean. Surrealism continued but went underground. In France some surrealists involved in the resistance movement were killed. In Japan there was an anti-surrealist law. Surrealists were put under house arrest or jailed. Four women surrealists died in Nazi concentration camps. Breton was granted asylum in America, provided that he refrained from radical political activity - and thereafter the FBI kept an eye on him.
Out of this period arose a serious examination of back culture, Négritude, in which many of the women were prominent. The position of women came under closer examination: Mary Low's text, 'Women and Love through Private Property', first published in Spanish in 1943 and here translated by the author, is a remarkable piece that I trust is a standard text for women's studies. Certainly should be.
There are too many good bits to quote from in this chapter, but I was interested in Edith Rimmington's contribution for two reasons. One, because she was a visual artist and her writings have not been collected two, because she writes in English. There are others in this collection, in fact preceding her in the anthology is Emily Bridgewater, of Birmingham - plus more famous names - but this exemplifies some of the differences between a work read in translation from another culture and one we naturally English-speaking folk are familiar with;
"As fantasy in the claws of the poet is released by the broken arm it becomes imprisoned in the ossiferous callus wherein lice build themselves a tomb in which to escape the magic of the Marvelous. Instead of, with the blood of the wound, rushing like the river to the sea - oh life orgasm - the river is damned."
In fact as my reading of this book progressed I wondered more and more if the fact of translation does not in some way contribute to the value of our reading of surrealism. Not that the translations are not excellent, of course, but that there is that extra remove which contributes to the dream-state, the non-reality -ness.
Certainly, this book will improve your French: I had no idea that coup de semonce means warning shot, nor that sablier couché is an hourglass lying down...and hands up if you knew that Etagère en flamme is a nick-nack shelf in flames?
Whilst on the subject: for a triumph of translation, I feel I must quote the editors translation from the French of Tyger, Tyger by Isobelle Meyrelles (from Le Livre du Tigre) to be found in chapter 5;
"Supple
slender
sinuous
sybaritic
sultan of the afternoon
silken
sudden
seditious
seductive
secretly
satanic
sumptuous
sorcere
subtly
sinking my
sources
savage king
saffron-coloured
striped with black, l
savor your
superb roar
sovereign
sacker
of silence, and l
submit
serenely to your rule, O
solitary
Seigneur of
Sombre beauty."
Back in Chapter 3, 1939-45, Suzanne Césaire writes: "Surrealism, tightrope of our hope". Almost a prayer... against the backdrop of the international situation this short statement becomes spotlit.
Chapter 4 covers 1946 -1959 and is called Surrealism versus the Cold War. In it is quoted Nora Mitrani. She writes in "Slaves, Suffragettes and the Whip" from Le Surréalism même no.2 (1957),
"...the infinite misfortune of being female, and today it is more so than to the extent that the poor things imagine liberation to be within reach, for their hands now hold ballots and cheque books. They haven't understood or have badly interpreted Rimbaud's great hope; he desired then humans but different, poets in a manner still unknown on earth: 'will her worlds of ideas differ from ours? She will discover strange, unfathomable things...' In reality, the most intelligent among them have found nothing that indicates a different night or a distant planet... They restrict themselves to adopting men's logic, their works and fears, and they do not seem satisfied unless their writings make their reader forget their sex."
Jaqueline Johnston writes of the art of that period:
"The rift in reality which cubism had made, widened by futurism, began to show streaks of a sky unknown before, an unimagined freedom. Dropping torn papers like Arp, signing ready-mades like Duchamp, pasting together incongruous images like Ernst, painting visions like Chirico, the next steps were taken; they discovered the extensibility of the interpretative powers of the mind, the synthesising leap which can, on occasion, lift into new realms, just as Jack climbed the beanstalk from the known into the unknown. They were engaged in making traps, or making molds wherein the newly discovered current of the imagination might flow and come to know itself. Everything was permitted except what had been see before."
In Chapter 5 Rosemont quotes Herbert Marcuse as being one of the first to point out that the May '68 uprising in Paris was a vindication of surrealism. By this point in the book a lot of the names of the women are familiar; we have read their work and delighted in its growth since their first involvement in this anthology. So now there emerges an uneasy sense of dèja-vû. As each section examines a period separately from its fellows, the same names re-occur in different groupings, different guises... this is not to say that the book repeats itself but that as the names shuffle about, the events, countries, times and mediums alter, then there is achieved this dream-like quality - as with the nature of the translations, so in the infrastructure of the book. Surrealism emerges unbidden!
Marianne Van Hirtum writes:
"Surrealism is a vital, a constitutional need. Those whom it recognises spontaneously belong to the same element. Always familiar, life for me is surrealism itself. Why? Because true life has nothing to do with what has insidiously been sanctioned by the repressive powers of morality, religion and law. ...Surrealism is the conscious attempt to restore humanity's true capacity to be and to desire without moral or physical constraint through the unlimited exercise of the imagination."
I left that epoch grinning over Nelly Kaplan's greeting: "Smile, but not for long, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Patriarchy".
The final chapter is A Challenge to the 21st Century. "Surrealism is always new because the subversive imagination is always right now, when you need it, ready or not." So writes Rosemont in her concluding piece and having read the book there is no question about that. We are offered an extract from Through the Vast Halls of Memory by Haifa Zangana - a woman's life in Iraq. We have work here from Chicago, Sweden, Moravia, England, Corsica, Argentina and others...fresh insights hot from the press. For the future I predict a blossoming of the relationship between surrealism and the Post-Modernists. Knitting with soup? Nonsense - it's a glorious challenge.
Vanilla Beer
back to
/
Front Page
Prenez
Mangez et Vivez Book