I recently picked up In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, CA.
It’s a treasure trove on insights about women artists working in the Surrealist movement from roughly the 1930s to the 1970s.
Here are some brief excerpts from the text:
Mexico has always held a privileged place in the surrealist imagination. In this marvelous country André Breton found the land of ‘convulsive beauty,’ the ‘magnetic mirror’ that attracted a contingent of women painters, photographers, poets, and writers associated with the surrealist movement. Many arrived from Europe after the outbreak of World War II: Alice Rahon, Eva Sulzer, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Kati Horna. Others, such as Rosa Rolanda, and years later Bridget Tichenor, came from the United States. Once in Mexico, they formed a complex web of relationships with Mexican women who sympathized with the surrealist spirit, such as the painters Frida Kahlo and María Izquierdo—the surrealist discoveries—and the photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo.
Tere Arcq, “In the Land of Convulsive Beauty, Mexico.”
I recall visiting LACMA as a child on an arts class field trip and encountering Frida Kahlo’s works there.
I was initially taken aback by some of her raw depictions of the female body and body parts, but drawn to the seamless and fluid ways in which natural elements like plants, shells and flowers wove their way into her imagery.
As a shy child fascinated by magic, I needed little to no explanation to understand her deeply felt connection to the lush world around her. Her visual language amplified and articulated what could not be spoken and/or understood in the English language alone.
The call to shamanic vision may come either through birth into a shamanic lineage or, in cases when a gifted individual is called by those in the spirit world, through intensely traumatic experiences such as a near-fatal accident, war, mental illness, torture, or exile. The women surrealists under consideration in this essay escaped the traumas of World War II through emigration. As they emerged from their descent into the ‘rabbit hole,’ they awakened to find themselves living in the midst of cosmologies and mythologies of Mesoamerican and North American cultures, both modern and indigenous.
Gloria Fernan Orenstein, “Down the Rabbit Hole: An Art of Shamanic Initiations and Mythic Rebirth.”
The works of Remedios Varos, Leonora Carrington and Rosa Rolanda speak profoundly to my adult self, especially after having a child.
Themes of half-humanness, oneness with the natural landscape, and an embrace of the epic forces of Nature spoke to the incompleteness of human-made objects in depicting the full experience of becoming a woman - giving birth, mothering, community-caring, etc.
Because my pregnancy was so difficult, I feel (in a visceral way) the preciousness of life and the labor of giving life - as well as its mystery and the magic of how life comes to be that eludes our rational understanding or explanations.
Here are five surreal women artists that influence my work.
Five Surreal Women Artists To Know
Leonora Carrington
The fairy-tale like quality of Carrington’s works are a reminder to see the fantastical in the everyday.
(from MOMA) “Animal/human hybrids, giant goddesses, spaces for magical transformation, and enigmatic creatures populate Leonora Carrington’s artworks and writing. She created a pantheon of subjects that convey her interest in the sacred—one that is untethered to a specific religion or culture—and its presence in the intimate corners of our psyches.
Carrington rebelled against the societal expectations she encountered as an upper-class young woman born in Lancashire, England. She balked at the rules of her Roman Catholic boarding schools, bored by the seemingly endless series of debutante balls. Her interests, instead, lay in Irish fables, and English writers such as Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Swift, and Beatrix Potter. As art historian Susan Aberth remembers, “Carrington, whose childhood was steeped in fairy tales and fantasy literature, never lost that youthful mindset and in her nineties would recite long passages of Lewis Carroll rhymes to me verbatim with a gleam in her eye.”1
At 19, Carrington visited the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London. Reviewing the exhibition’s catalogue, Carrington was struck by the work of Max Ernst, and felt a particular affinity for his dreamlike painting Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924). The following year, she met Ernst in Paris and the two began a relationship, soon establishing a home in St. Martin d’Ardèche in the south of France, where they frequently hosted their Surrealist circle of friends. Nevertheless, Carrington remained on the periphery of the movement. As her mentor and friend the Argentine-Italian artist Léonor Fini has said, Carrington was “never Surrealist but a true revolutionary.”2
Read more here.
Rosa Rolanda
(from Biennale Arte 2024)
“Rosa Rolanda was a multidisciplinary artist whose varied practice included choreography, photography, and painting. Although Rolanda described herself as a neo-figurative artist, it can be argued that Tehuana (1940) is influenced by the political project of Mexican Muralism – which often portrayed idealised depictions of Indigenous children, to embody a “pure” Mexican identity – and its modern style of figuration. Rolanda depicts a young girl with large almond-shaped eyes, deep brown skin, and rounded facial features. The subject, a girl from the isthmus of Tehuantepec, wears a huipil, the traditional garb of Indigenous Zapotec women. Some consider the Zapotecs a matriarchal society, and Rolanda, like her friend Frida Kahlo, wore the huipil as a symbol of feminist resistance in a patriarchal twentieth-century Mexican society. A hummingbird, an important symbol in Mayan creation myths, hangs like a pendant around the subject’s neck. This use of precontact iconography is characteristic of Mexican Modernism, in which many artists looked to indigeneity to create a revolutionary and culturally decolonised Mexican identity.”
Read more here.
Remedios Varos
Varos’s luminous works envision the inner life of women as enchanting, mysterious and powerful.
(from National Museum of Women in the Arts)
“Varo (1908-1963) used her superior technical skill to create richly detailed surrealist works filled with science, magic, and women’s experience. She explored the world through her work while also inventing alternatives to it. From her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1956, Varo was an instant celebrity, with crowds lining up to see her work and long waiting lists for commissions.
In her meticulous paintings rendered in jewel-like tones, worlds overlap to create a reality apart: a chair back mysteriously opens to reveal human faces, hands reach through walls, and tabletops peel back to expose living roots. Varo wanted to know how and why the universe functioned and looked to dreams, astrology, and science for inspiration, and to visual and literary sources for themes. She set up hypotheses and explored them in paint, opening the door to new ways of envisioning nature and the self.
Most of the people who inhabit Varo’s paintings reflect the artist’s features, the heart-shaped face with large almond eyes, long sharp nose, and thick hair. In many of Varo’s works a female character employs alchemical methods, as in Creation of the Birds (1957), in which an owl artist/musician uses synthesized materials to create a bird that takes flight out of a window. And though Surrealism was the aesthetic within which she developed, her later work creates an alternate vision of the movement.”
Read more here.
Ana Mendieta
(Not in the text) Mendieta’s legacy has been overshadowed by her personal relationship and the scandal of her death; I find her works impossible to look away from—especially the Silueta Series which are primordial and commanding.
(from anamendieta.com)
“Ana Mendieta® was an interdisciplinary artist, referring to herself as a sculptor. She is best known for her earth/body works, most specifically her now iconic Silueta Series, in which she used her body, and later the absence of the body, in the landscape as a way of connecting with nature and the universe. Spanning a period of 15 years, Mendieta created groundbreaking work in sculpture, photography, film, drawing and site-specific installations using organic materials such as earth, water and fire. Her pioneering works are in more than 120 public collections worldwide and continues to be influential today.
Ana Mendieta’s innovative work has been the subject of 56 monographic exhibitions, which includes 16 major museum retrospectives.
Ana Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba in 1946 and died in New York City in 1985.”
Read more here.
Luchita Hurtado
(Not in the text) Hurtado’s sky paintings fascinate me with their alternative viewpoint of the world—a visual decision that draws the connection between the cosmos and her.
(from luchitahurtado.com) Although she associated with a vast network of internationally renowned artists and intellectuals, including members of the Dynaton, the Mexican muralists, and the Surrealists, Hurtado’s practice had always remained an independent pursuit. Her body of work is cohered through an examination of self-affirmation, introduced in her early period from the 1940s to the 1960s in an output defined by surrealist figuration, biomorphism and geometric abstraction, executed in brightly hued palettes with striking expressive range. Hurtado’s work continued to evolve throughout the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrating a fluid shift towards representative figuration that led to a production of contemplative self-portraits known as her ‘I Am’ paintings. Asserting her presence through a personal perspective of the body — rendered from above at skewed angles — Hurtado coalesced the viewer’s gaze with hers, creating a depth of field activated by the unexpected position of the floor as a backdrop, juxtaposing soft corporeal lines against the hard edge geometric patterns of the environments beneath her.
Read more here.