Farewell To The Muse Love War And The Women Of Surrealism

A fascinating examination of the ambitions and friendships of a talented group of midcentury women artists Farewell to the Muse documents what it meant to be young, ambitious, and female in the context of an avant-garde movement defined by celebrated men whose backgrounds were often quite different from those of their younger lovers and companions. Focusing on the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Whitney Chadwick charts five female friendships among the Surrealists to show how Surrealism, female friendship, and the experiences of war, loss, and trauma shaped individual women’s transitions from someone else’s muse to mature artists in their own right. Her vivid account includes the fascinating story of Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe in occupied Jersey, as well as the experiences of Lee Miller and Valentine Penrose at the front line. Chadwick draws on personal correspondence between women, including the extraordinary letters between Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini during the months following the arrest and imprisonment of Carrington’s lover Max Ernst and the letter Frida Kahlo shared with her friend and lover Jacqueline Lamba years after it was written in the late 1930s. This history brings a new perspective to the political context of Surrealism as well as fresh insights on the vital importance of female friendship to its progress.

A fascinating examination of the ambitions and friendships of a talented group of midcentury women artists Farewell to the Muse documents what it meant to be young, ambitious, and female in the context of an avant-garde movement defined by celebrated men whose backgrounds were often quite different from those of their younger lovers and companions. Focusing on the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Whitney Chadwick charts five female friendships among the Surrealists to show how Surrealism, female friendship, and the experiences of war, loss, and trauma shaped individual women’s transitions from someone else’s muse to mature artists in their own right. Her vivid account includes the fascinating story of Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe in occupied Jersey, as well as the experiences of Lee Miller and Valentine Penrose at the front line. Chadwick draws on personal correspondence between women, including the extraordinary letters between Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini during the months following the arrest and imprisonment of Carrington’s lover Max Ernst and the letter Frida Kahlo shared with her friend and lover Jacqueline Lamba years after it was written in the late 1930s. This history brings a new perspective to the political context of Surrealism as well as fresh insights on the vital importance of female friendship to its progress.

The Militant Muse documents what it meant to be young, ambitious and female in the context of an avant-garde movement defined by celebrated men whose educational, philosophical and literary backgrounds were often quite different from those of their younger lovers and companions. Focusing on the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Whitney Chadwick charts five intense, far-reaching female friendships among the Surrealists to show how Surrealism, female friendship and the experiences of war, loss and trauma shaped individual women's transitions from beloved muses to mature artists. Her vivid account includes the fascinating story of Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe's subversive activities in occupied Jersey, as well as the experiences of Lee Miller and Valentine Penrose at the frontline. Chadwick draws on personal correspondence between women, including the extraordinary letters between Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini during the months following the arrest and imprisonment of Carrington's lover Max Ernst at the beginning of World War Two, and the letter Frida Kahlo shared with her friend and lover Jacqueline Lamba years after it was written in the late 1930s during a difficult stay in Paris, marred by her intense dislike of Breton. Thoroughly engrossing, this history brings a new perspective to the political context of Surrealism, as well as fresh insights on the vital importance of female friendship to its artistic and intellectual flowering. With 85 illustrations

A revised edition of Whitney Chadwick’s seminal work on the women artists who shaped the Surrealist art movement. This pioneering book stands as the most comprehensive treatment of the lives, ideas, and art works of the remarkable group of women who were an essential part of the Surrealist movement. Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and Dorothea Tanning, among many others, embodied their age as they struggled toward artistic maturity and their own “liberation of the spirit” in the context of the Surrealist revolution. Their stories and achievements are presented here against the background of the turbulent decades of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s and the war that forced Surrealism into exile in New York and Mexico. Whitney Chadwick, author of the highly acclaimed Women, Art, and Society, interviewed and corresponded with most of the artists themselves in the course of her research. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, now revised with a new foreword by art historian Dawn Ades, contains a wealth of extracts from unpublished writings and numerous illustrations never before reproduced. Since this book was first published, it has acquired the undeniable status of a classic among artists, art historians, critics, and cultural historians. It has inspired and necessitated a revision of the story of the Surrealist movement.

These sixteen illustrated essays present an important revision of surrealism by focusing on the works of women surrealists and their strategies to assert positions as creative subjects within a movement that regarded woman primarily as an object of masculine desire or fear.While the male surrealists attacked aspects of the bourgeois order, they reinforced the traditional patriarchal image of woman. Their emphasis on dreams, automatic writing, and the unconscious reveal some of the least inhibited masculine fantasies. The first resistance to the male surrealists' projection of the female figure arose in the writings and paintings of marginalized woman artists and writers associated with Surrealism. The essays in this collection explore the complexity of these women's works, which simultaneously employ and subvert the dominant discourse of male surrealists. Essays What Do Little Girls Dream Of: The Insurgent Writing of Gis�le Prassinos • Finding What You Are Not Looking For • From D�jeuner en fourrure to Caroline: Meret Oppenheim's Chronicle of Surrealism • Speaking with Forked Tongues: "Male" Discourse in "Female" Surrealism? • Androgyny: Interview with Meret Oppenheim • The Body Subversive: Corporeal Imagery in Carrington, Prassinos, and Mansour • Identity Crises: Joyce Mansour's Narratives • Joyce Mansour and Egyptian Mythology • In the Interim: The Constructivist Surrealism of Kay Sage • The Flight from Passion in Leonora Carrington's Literary Work • Beauty and/Is the Beast: Animal Symbology in the Work of Leonora Carrington, Remedio Varo, and Leonor Fini • Valentine, Andr�, Paul et les autres, or the Surrealization of Valentine Hugo • Refashioning the World to the Image of Female Desire: The Collages of Aube Ell�ou�t • Eileen Agar • Statement by Dorothea Tanning

Surrealist Women displays the range and significance of women's contributions to surrealism. Penelope Rosemont, affiliated with the Paris Surrealist Group in the 1960s and now a Chicago poet and painter, has assembled nearly three hundred texts by ninety-six women from twenty-eight countries. She opens the book with a succinct summary of surrealism's basic aims and principles, followed by a discussion of the place of gender in the origins of the movement.The texts are organised into historical periods ranging from the 1920s to the present, with introductions describing trends in the movement for each period; and each surrealist's work is prefaced by a brief biographical statement. Authors include El Allailly, Bruna, Cunard, Carrington, Cesaire, Gauthier, Giovanna, van Hirtum, Kahlo, Levy, Mansour, Mitrani, Pailthorpe, Joyce Peters, Rahon, Svankmajerova, Taub, Zangana

If anyone can teach us how to pursue the life and work of an artist, it is the artists in Truth Bomb. This compilation of pioneering and established women artists from around the world will motivate and empower you, challenge you to find solace in the shared human experiences of birth, death, love, anger, joy, sadness. Their sassiness will fire your spirit.Truth Bomb offers the very best commentary and insight into the incredible formation of diverse women artists while uncovering the power of taking a chance, pushing the envelope and ultimately not being shy when it comes to making a mark. It is a magical visual mash-up of images, memoirs, moments, interviews and inspirational beginnings as told by twenty-two leading women artists, including Beci Orpin, Mickalene Thomas, Kaylene Whiskey and Judy Chicago. Truth Bomb is an ode to art and artists and an attempt to decipher the mystery of creativity.

A groundbreaking study of the women of abstract art and their works, presented as a richly illustrated visual history. Women in Abstraction reevaluates the work of women abstract artists, changing the story of modern and contemporary art. A tie-in catalog to a major exhibition at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, this volume explores the fundamental role women artists played in the development of abstract art in the twentieth century. In this rich, sweeping collection, editors Christine Macel and Karolina Lewandowska bring together more than one hundred artists in painting, sculpture, dance, applied arts, photography, film, and performing arts. Understanding that abstract art must be looked at in the light of the artists’ political and personal surroundings, this volume dives into the creation and reception of these artworks over time. From the symbolist abstraction of Hilma af Klint, now widely regarded as the first abstract artist, and the sensual abstraction of Huguette Caland, to the purist non-objective approach of Verena Loewensberg, each artist’s relationship to abstraction is examined. These artworks are presented with thought- provoking essays by esteemed critics, contextualizing and exploring the subjects and themes of the movement. Ultimately, this volume questions the legitimacy of the notion of “female artists” and presents this group as simply artists, full of complexities and paradoxes.

A lively history of the Surrealists, both known and unknown, by one of the last surviving members of the movement—artist and bestselling author Desmond Morris. Surrealism did not begin as an art movement but as a philosophical strategy, a way of life, and a rebellion against the establishment that gave rise to the World War I. In The Lives of the Surrealists, surrealist artist and celebrated writer Desmond Morris concentrates on the artists as people—as remarkable individuals. What were their personalities, their predilections, their character strengths and flaws? Unlike the impressionists or the cubists, the surrealists did not obey a fixed visual code, but rather the rules of surrealist philosophy: work from the unconscious, letting your darkest, most irrational thoughts well up and shape your art. An artist himself, and contemporary of the later surrealists, Morris illuminates the considerable variation in each artist’s approach to this technique. While some were out-and-out surrealists in all they did, others lived more orthodox lives and only became surrealists at the easel or in the studio. Focusing on the thirty-two artists most closely associated with the surrealist movement, Morris lends context to their life histories with narratives of their idiosyncrasies and their often complex love lives, alongside photos of the artists and their work.

This pioneering biography of the British poet and translator David Gascoyne (1916-2001) candidly describes his creative work, involvement with surrealism, addictions, tormented private life, and his many friendships in England and France.