Love, Friendship and Rivalry: The Women Beside the Men in Early Surrealism

Traditionally, when discussing surrealism names such as Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico and Man Ray, come to mind. They have permeated our culture so successfully that works such as Dali’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus are instantly recognizable and Man Ray’s combinations of unlikely objects have had critics second guessing for decades.
What is most noticeable about the many lists of ‘Great Surrealist Artists’ is that usually all the names are male; the only frequent exception being that of Frida Kahlo, who’s iconic status in Mexico extends as far as having her face printed on their bank notes. However, this does not mean she was the only female surrealist, nor was she the only one with talent. Opening just in time for International Women’s Day, Tate Liverpool’s exhibition on Leonora Carrington is a fine reminder of the calibre of women working alongside these men.

Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst

Leonora Carrington The Pomps of the Subsoil 1947

 

Leonora Carrington, began her career as the plus one of famous surrealist Max Ernst. It is easy to become acquainted with the story of Carrington’s life. The events would make a brilliant film - her sheltered youth, the elopement with an older man, the onset of war followed by a mental breakdown, a second elopement and finally settling down in Mexico. Her life is documented as a whirlwind of romance, pain, danger and drama. 

In 1948 Time Magazine reviewed an exhibition of her work:

"The walls… were hopping with demons. Feathery, hairy, horny, half-luminous creatures merged imperceptibly into birds, animals and plants. Painted with cobweb delicacy, they conspired and paraded before misty landscapes and night skies thick with floating islands. All the pictures had two things in common: an overall melancholy and the signature, Leonora Carrington…"

This is an apt description of the hallucinatory world of Carrington’s paintings. When asked about the meaning behind her work, she said:

"You’re trying to intellectualise something, desperately and you’re wasting you’re time. That’s not a way of understanding… [you can only understand] by your own feelings."

This response is more purely surrealist than any of the Freudian symbols or mythological references appropriated by her male counterparts. As Andre Breton wrote in his text ‘Arcane 17’, woman is a natural ‘conductor of mental electricity’. Likewise Carrington wants us to feel, not to think, and through feeling, tap into the unconscious and intuitive mind.

Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst

Dorothea Tanning in front of her 1998 painting Quiet-Willow Walk

Although his relationship with Carrington has been greatly romanticized, Max Ernst’s most successful and long-lasting relationship was with Dorothea Tanning. Here, Tanning explains her views on marriage and equality:

"If you get married you’re branded. We could have gone on, Max and I, all our lives without the tag. I never heard him use the word “wife” in regard to me. He was very sorry about that wife thing. I’m very much against the arrangement of procreation, at least for humans. If I could have designed it, it would be a tossup who gets pregnant, the man or woman. Boy, that would end rape for one thing."

Tanning’s early paintings often feature female, or simply feminine, characters in minutely detailed Gothic and dream-like settings. The regular use of the female form throughout surrealist work has been an interesting playground for debate. Numerous critics, such as Susan Gubar, have argued that the surrealist’s appropriation of the female form in works such as Rene Magritte’s Le Viol can be seen as an aggressive objectification of women. Others, such as Germain Greer, take this argument further, debating whether the female members of the group had internalized this viewpoint and perpetrated it in their own work.

Dorothea Tanning
Nue couchée 1969–70

Tanning’s sculptural piece Nue Couchee has also often been interpreted as a comment on female sexuality due to its limb-like protuberances and nude pink fabric, however she strongly rejects any association to gender. Neither does she want to be analysed in terms of her femininity and labelled in the category of ‘woman artist’:

"I wish you wouldn't harp on that word, ‘women.’ Women artists. There is no such thing - or person. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘elephant artist.’ You may be a woman and you may be an artist; but the one is a given and the other is you."
Interview with Carlo McCormick for Bomb Magazine

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

Frida Kahlo, 1941.

Frida Kahlo is certainly no longer seen as the woman behind Diego Rivera, but at the time his fame was overshadowing. These days she has been appropriated as a feminist forerunner, stoic sufferer, Mexican national heirloom and one of the ‘Great Surrealist Artists’.  People worldwide have been enchanted by her frank, intense and honest letters which give an insight into her character and opinions. The director of the Bellas Artes Museum, Roxana Velasquez Martinez del Campo, described her as ‘a woman in constant expression’ and this is what we see when we look at her self-portraits. They are instinctive depictions of her subconscious with repeated references to her physical and emotional pain:

"I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration."

It is this openness, which makes her remarkable and has caused so many people to respect and admire her.

Despite their rocky relationship, Kahlo’s love for Diego was insurmountable. In this explanation of her opinion of marriage, we see her fatalistic approach to marriage:

"I don’t believe in marriage. I think at worst it’s a hostile political act, a way for small-minded men to keep women in the house and out of the way, wrapped up in the guise of traditions and conservative religious nonsense. At best, it’s a happy delusion - these two people who truly love each other and have no idea how truly miserable they’re about to make each other.  But, but, when two people know that, and they decide with eyes wide open to face each other and get married anyway, then I don’t think it’s conservative or delusional. I think it’s radical and courageous and very romantic."

Kahlo’s passion for Diego may have caused her pain, but she was never subdued by it and in many ways this passion contributed to her becoming the powerful figure she is now.

Frida Kahlo
The Love-Embrace of the Universe 1949

Carrington, Tanning and Kahlo are by no means the only surrealist artists who were once seen as secondary to their partners. Photographer Lee Miller was the lover of Man Ray and artist and writer Unica Zurn was the partner of Hans Bellmer… The list goes on. In his essay ‘Speaking with Forked Tongues: ‘Male’ Discourse in ‘Female’ Surrealism?’ Robert J. Belton contextualizes this pattern:

"The women who did speak up during that particular monologue [of Surrealism] were drowned out by male voices because their historical moment… had not yet come."

Perhaps, now, their time has finally arrived.

Beautiful Mess

Creativity needs to flow -and if it doesn't, you will have to get it moving.
The book: Mess, The Manual of Accidents and Mistakes from Kari Smith was for me the urge to get something going. And trying to loose my sense of perfectionism. The title really says it all!

On this page an old German vintage picture of a  beach was meant to be altered. Just a tiny bit. The assignment was to erase something. Boy, did I erase something! I erased almost everything. The picture was full of people in the sea, little houses on the beach, big buildings in the sea. Not a beach that I would like to be. So I started to erase. And kept erasing. The only things left are the beach, sea, sky, dunes and those two figures in the foreground. A little bit of gesso and watercolor crayons did the magic.

One of my favorite assignments was on this page. Take a lot of little paper strips, add glue to the page, drop the paper strips in the wet glue from a distance.
Simple and messy. Just what I needed.

First I did one side of the spread with cut paper strips. Then I used the little circles from my puncher for the other side of the spread.
This simple act brings back childhood feelings of pleasure, fun and wonder. And the more mess you create, the better you will feel. Well, that is the way it works for me... :-)

This book is a relief to work in. You can do a scribble for 10 seconds, or take some more time for other assignments. Don't want to play with paints? Choose another spread and just find an assignment that you like. No need to start at page 1 and advance to the next page!

Want to get rid of a creativity block too? You can find the book here:
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9781846144479/Mess
This is my favorite online bookstore because I don't have to worry about the shipping costs and/or order costs. Simple because you only pay for the books that you order - they have worldwide free shipping and no order costs.
Do you also like to play this way? 

Appreciate the Little Things: Contemporaries - Idea to Masterpiece

Light and shadow painting by Rashad Alakbarov.

"Bipolar Disorder" by Sishir Bommakanti.

"The Hand of God" by François-Auguste-René Rodin.

"Mountain Vista" pushpin art by Magdalena Bors.

Bronze sculpture of river-god Tyne by David Wynne.

Polished stainless steel portal by David Harber.

"Dancer" charcoal and black conté pencil drawing by Henrik Moses.

Optimus Prime made from real car parts by Primitive Designs. Photography courtesy of Andrew Finlay.

Sigmar Polke and Richard Dadd

Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke grew up in East Germany. After moving with his family to West Germany, settling in Wittich, he studied glass painting from 1959 to 1960 at Dusseldorf Kaiserwerth and then transferred to the Academy of Art. With fellow student Gerhard Richter he formulated a Pop inspired "Capital Realist" anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial short-hand of advertising. The anarchistic element of the work Polke developed was largely engendered by his mercurial approach. His irreverence for traditional painting techniques and materials and his lack of allegiance to any one mode of representation has established his now-respected reputation as a visual revolutionary. Paganini, an expression of "the difficulty of purging the demons of Nazism" - witness the "hidden" swastikas - is typical of Polke's tendency to accumulate a range of different mediums within one canvas. It is not unusual for Polke to combine household materials and paint, lacquers, pigments, screen print and transparent sheeting in one piece. A complicated "narrative" is often implicit in the multi-layered picture, giving the effect of witnessing the projection of a hallucination or dream through a series of veils. 

My reasons why I came to be so interested in his work was because I found out that he used techniques that allowed him to portray an image over an image; which was my intention throughout this commission. Most of his pieces of work aren't as quite as good as compared to his expression works like the referral to Nazism. However, the thing that interested me the most whilst looking at his work was the fact that he used a larger scale in his work and how he interpreted three multiple pieces together but still made them flow through each one more effectively.

Richard Dadd:

Richard Dadd
The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke 1855-64
Oil on canvas
support: 540 x 394 mm frame: 670 x 525 x 65 mm
Presented by Siegfried Sassoon in memory of his friend and fellow officer Julian Dadd, a great-nephew of the artist, and of his two brothers who gave their lives in the First World War 1963

Richard Dadd was not only extremely well educated, he was on his way to becoming a full-blooded representative of Victorian painting before killing his father in a fit of psychosis and being subsequently confined to an institution. He painted The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke for the director of the hospital. Did he perhaps want to present it as proof of his sanity? Sigmar Polke delves into Dadd’s enduring dialogue with the figures he created.

I’ve known Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke 1855–64. When I look at it again today, it’s as if I were looking into a tapestry and losing my way. Its composition is quite unlike any other Victorian fairy painting. The point of view is not clearly defined. Instead, the individual elements appear to be linked by almost invisible forces.
The texture of the picture is all-embracing, in the ‘all-over’ style of Jackson Pollock. There is no horizon; we seem to be looking into a kind of shallow box, a diorama of scenes from nature – with one fabulous trick. Only the bright patch of earth at the bottom of the picture generates a bit of distance, the necessary breathing space.
Actually, it’s like lying in the grass and observing nature, like picking up a stone and gazing into a singular universe. It reminds me of the ‘Little World by the Wayside’, a popular series of postcards issued in the former East Germany. It is Richard Dadd’s other world. The artist devoted a full nine years – from 1855 to 1864 – to painting the picture while locked away in the isolation of the insane asylum, Bethlem Hospital. And he painted from memory, as is so often pointed out. He spent those nine years getting every detail right, working as concisely as Albrecht Dürer did on his The Great Piece of Turf of 1503. However, Richard Dadd (1817–1886) directs the precision of his gaze at the fantastical, his hallucinating mind carrying him into increasingly elaborate, intense levels of invention.
It is the grass that holds everything together optically, lending the picture its gently magical drive, while the petaled radiance of the daisies produces large bright highlights. The composition is, in fact, dotted with round shapes, as in the large spiral movement of the vines, or the curiously curled stems. Spherical forms, distributed throughout, take the shape of hazelnuts or prickly fruits or white ruffles on a shirt. Dadd uses them, gently playing with the picture space, as he does the daisies, tipped over or seen from the side, or the puffed-up skirts of the women. The daisies also set the stage for the artist’s curious treatment of scale. The composition obeys the formal principle of dots spreading out across the picture plane – a principle that is, of course, not alien to me.
Dadd’s skillful interweaving of a powerful, depth less frontal and sensually emphasized shapes is highly sophisticated. A rich materiality prevails in this painting, an iridescence that ranges from the vegetable forms of nature to the fabrics worn by the cast of fairy characters. In view of the structures, one sometimes wonders whether the artist has depicted rock or leaf, plant or wing, body or blossom.
The idea of covering a surface with figures goes way back to Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) and Pieter Bruegel (1525–1569). But in Dadd’s case, there is always this special lighting, a luminosity that comes from within, a kind of fluorescent effect. White dots appear on every single tiny pebble, on the buttons of the minuscule costumes, on every little leaf – until we realize, at some point, that this is dew. Almost physically, we can follow the path of a parallel reality slowly emerging in the process of looking hard and wanting to be precise. What a difference from, say, Hercules Seghers (1589–1638) or the Impressionists, who break down what they see into generously airy, abstract patches and structures.
Richard Dadd was not only extremely well educated, he was on his way to becoming a full-blooded representative of Victorian painting before killing his father in a fit of psychosis and being subsequently confined to an institution. At that time, the fantasy life of fairies – from Grimm to Shakespeare – enjoyed widespread popularity as an imaginary world fully integrated into reality. Dadd’s appropriation of this world is, however, neither kitsch, nor facile, nor garrulous, because it does not obey the then current pictorial conventions. Nor does his vision echo the spirited confections of popular draughtsman J.J. Grandville’s fantastic book Un Autre Monde 1844. Instead, one senses the extraordinary intensity of an enduring dialogue between the artist and the universe of figures that he created. Isolated from the outside world, he painted the picture for the director of the hospital. Did he perhaps want to present it as proof of his sanity?
And his vision has nothing to do with the hallucinations caused by drugs, for nothing is distorted, there are no exaggerated metamorphoses. But the displacement, the ‘pink elephants’ of alcoholism, the experience of states such as those induced by drugs today, were then more generally accepted as constituents of life and culture. (Besides, people ate poorly, for instance, rotten meat…) If one wants to find a sign for his pathology, one could interpret the obsessive regularity of the dewdrops as symbolizing a kind of self-fertilizing machine.
This painting interests me with its concept of time as a self-contained sphere. There is obviously something going on in the picture plane. It does not merely depict a snarled tangle of events. It has momentum. This comes from the Fairy Feller in the foreground, his axe poised on high, ready to chop a giant hazelnut in half. The figures are in a trance, the action is suspended. This delayed, arrested act corresponds to the suspended act of painting. Just take a closer look and you will see: the artist has not finished painting his picture. The axe and the bright patch of earth still show raw, unpainted canvas. Why? Because on closer inspection, an almost divine power becomes visible that seems to rule the composition after all: the bearded figure in the center with his huge, three-tiered crown, the Patriarch, who will give the signal for the axe to fall. He has already stretched out his hand. It is as if that moment were being delayed for all eternity by never allowing the picture to be completed. We are faced with the yawning psychological abyss of patricide.
Formally, however, the painting is anything but static or stiff; Dadd has succeeded in lending simple blades of grass an incredible energy and sense of motion. If I were asked what links this painting with my art, I would say I am reminded in particular of the Schleifenbilder of 1986, a series of whorls after Dürer’s woodcut Large Triumphal Carriage of Emperor Maximilian I 1522, where the delicate curlicues are assigned to the virtues of Providencia, Acrimonia, Virilitas, Experientia, Solertia and Audacia. These ornamental loops are exactly like the tendrils of grass in Dadd’s work. They are not natural, there are no such plants – the closest they come are to our sweet peas, but then they would have blossoms.
Richard Dadd is said to have suffered sunstroke on a journey to Egypt and Palestine, causing the outbreak of his mental illness. More likely he was overwhelmed by the intensity of his impressions in this encounter with the world. Perhaps figures in the painting are not transformed people, but rather animals – beings from a middle world in a middle time. One more curlicue, a whorl, my coda follows in the form of an ancient Celtic saying:

A city lasts three years,
A dog outlives three cities,
A horse outlasts three dogs,
A person outlives three horses,
A donkey outlives three people,
A wild goose outlives three donkeys,
A crow outlives three wild geese,
A hart outlives three crows,
A raven outlives three harts,
And the Phoenix outlives three ravens.

In the Garden with Sandy Dooley

Bright Autumn

In an age dominated by conceptualism and abstraction, Sandy Dooley’s beautiful landscapes come as a welcome respite. Painting out-of-doors to capture the interplay of light and shadow, Dooley is spearheading an Impressionist renaissance. But this isn't just Impressionism churned out 150 years later – Dooley revitalizes the once-radical style with a contemporary twist, expertly capturing the tension between figuration and abstraction.

Still contemplating my techniques and ideas to complete my final project piece, I came across Sandy Dooley and love how she portrays a countryside character by using a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric blotches of paint to form the wonders outside.

Landscape artist living and working in the beautiful Weald of Kent in the UK, Sandy is known for paintings that transport the viewer to the in-the-moment experience of being out in the countryside surrounded by the colors and visual richness of the natural world.

Her work captivated me as I am deciding whether to produce something similar in terms of vibrant colors, I love using color and texture in my work and I’m always attempting to use these elements to create a harmonious balance.

Spring Greener

Winter Blue

Given that her studio is in her garden and she works outside as much possible, Sandy exquisitely captures the moods of each season in her paintings – from the verdant greens of spring and warm tones of an Indian summer, to the deep rich hues of fall and the cool blues of winter.  Her work feels as spontaneous and lush as any garden with her vibrant colors.  

Its also like she uses the same scene in every piece of work but in different seasonal times which is what I have been looking into doing throughout my experiments though I have used watercolor because for me the unpredictability and uncontrollable nature of watercolor make it the most exciting and expressive medium to use even if its just to use as a block color or to add some minor detail.

Indian Summer

Coastal

Artists in 60 Seconds: Jesús-Rafael Soto

Spiral 1955

Movement, Style, School or Type of Art:

Though most frequently associated with Op Art, Soto was, more precisely, a Kinetic artist. His works were meant to display not only the implied movement of Op, but also the actual movement Kinetic Art provides by allowing the viewer to participate, or "move through" the piece.
This was especially notable in his Penetrables series of the 1960s, where spectators were invited to walk through lots of hanging nylon filament line.

Soto is also rightly linked with the Geometric movement in Venezuela.

Date and Place of Birth:

July 5, 1923, Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela

Life:

Trained in his native Venezuela, Soto's early influences were Cubism, Cézanne and Mondrian. It wasn't until he moved to Paris, in the 1950's, that he found his true calling in geometric art. (It probably helped that he also met kindred spirits - Victor Vasarely, for one - in Paris.) Besides his Kinetic works, Soto is best known for his use of modern materials such as nylon filament thread, metal rods, steel, aluminum, perspex (transparent acrylic resin) and industrial-grade paint.

Important Works:

• Spiral, 1955
• Penetrables (sculpture series), 1960s
• Suspended Apparent Volume, 1976
• Ambivalences (series), 1980s
• Nylon Cube, 1983

Date and Place of Death:

January 19, 2005, Paris

Penetrables (sculpture series), 1960s

LACMA

What is Op Art?

A closer look at the 1960s art style known to trick the eye

Flashback to 1964. In the United States, they were still reeling from the assassination of our President, escalating the Civil Rights movement, being "invaded" by British pop/rock music and, in general, pretty much done with notions of achieving idyllic lifestyles (despite that which was touted in the 1950s). Given the circumstances, it was a perfect time for a new artistic movement to burst on the scene.In October of 1964, in an article describing this new style of art, Time Magazine coined the phrase "Optical Art" (or "Op Art", as it's more commonly known). The term referenced the fact that Op Art is comprised of illusion, and often appears - to the human eye - to be moving or breathing due to its precise, mathematically-based composition.

After (and because of) a major 1965 exhibition of Op Art entitled The Responsive Eye, the public became enraptured with the movement. As a result, one began to see Op Art showing up everywhere: in print and television advertising, as LP album art and as a fashion motif in clothing and interior decoration.
Although the term was coined and the exhibition held in the mid-1960's, most people who've studied these things agree that Victor Vasarely pioneered the movement with his 1938 painting Zebra. M. C. Escher - whose style has sometimes caused him to be listed as an Op artist - created works with amazing perspectives and use of tessellations that certainly helped point the way for others. And it can be argued that none of Op Art would've been possible - let alone embraced by the public - without the prior Abstract and Expressionist movements that de-emphasized (or, in many cases, eliminated) representational subject matter.

As an "official" movement, Op Art has been given a life-span of around three years. This doesn't mean, though, that every artist ceased employing Op Art as their style by 1969. Bridget Riley is one noteworthy artist who has moved from achromatic to chromatic pieces, but has steadfastly created Op Art from its beginning to the present day. Additionally, anyone who has gone through a post-secondary fine arts program probably has a tale or two of Op-ish projects created during color theory studies.

It's also worth mentioning that, in the digital age, Op Art is sometimes viewed with bemusement. Perhaps you, too, have heard the (rather snide, in my opinion) comment: "A child with the proper graphic design software could produce this stuff." Quite true, of a gifted child, with a computer and the proper software at his or her disposal, in the 21st century. This certainly wasn't the case in the early 1960s, and the 1938 date of Vasarely's Zebra speaks for itself in this regard. Op Art represents a great deal of math, planning and technical skill, as none of it came freshly-inked out of a computer peripheral. Original, hand-created Op Art deserves respect, at the very least.

What are the key characteristics of Op Art?

• First and foremost, Op Art exists to fool the eye. Op compositions create a sort of visual tension, in the viewer's mind, that gives works the illusion of movement. For example, concentrate on Bridget Riley's Dominance Portfolio, Blue (1977) - for even a few seconds - and it begins to dance and wave in front of one's eyes. Realistically, you know any Op Art piece is flat, static and two-dimensional. Your eye, however, begins sending your brain the message that what it's seeing has begun to oscillate, flicker, throb and any other verb one can employ to mean: "Yikes! This painting is moving!"
• Because of its geometrically-based nature, Op Art is, almost without exception, non-representational.
• The elements employed (color, line and shape) are carefully chosen to achieve maximum effect.
• The critical techniques used in Op Art are perspective and careful juxtaposition of color (whether chromatic [identifiable hues] or achromatic [black, white or gray]).
• In Op Art, as in perhaps no other artistic school, positive and negative spaces in a composition are of equal importance. Op Art could not be created without both.