Feminine surrealism ?

Exhibition catalogue “Feminine surrealism ? », presented at the Musée de Montmartre – Jardins Renoir, Paris (March 31 to September 10, 2023).

Surrealism offered women a framework for expression and creativity that probably had no equivalent in other avant-garde movements.

However, it is often by appropriating and extending themes initiated by the “leaders” of the movement that women expressed their freedom. It is also by freeing themselves from what sometimes became a surrealist doxa that they asserted themselves. “All against” Surrealism, this is how we could define their diversified and complex positions with regard to the movement.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, “feminine surrealism” formed ephemeral constellations, through often temporary rallying to the movement, but also through friendships that were formed outside this framework.

The imagination of these artists is not aligned with that of the movement's male figures. Their practices, frequently interdisciplinary – pictorial, photographic, sculptural, cinematographic, literary… – express their desire for great escapes beyond heterosexual norms and geographical borders.

It is a cartography of a fragmented and globalized movement that the exhibition outlines by evoking the Belgian, Mexican, British, American, Prague and French hearths of Surrealism that these women have enriched, sometimes passing from one to the other. .

Summary

Préface
Preface

« La liberté n’est donnée à personne, il faut la prendre »
‘Nobody Will Give You Freedom, Yu Jave to Take It’

EUROPÉENNES…
EUROPEANS

Danser sur des rivages lointains : les femmes surréalistes britanniques
Dancing on Distant Shores: British Women Surrealists

Du surréalisme belge au féminin pluriel
From Belgian Surrealism to Feminine Plural

En Scandinavie, surréalistes et aubord de l’abstraction ?
Scandinavian Surrealists on the Verge of Abstraction?

CATALOGUES D’ŒUVRES
ARTWORKS

Étoiles filantes : Sheila, Hélène, Sonia et Xenia
Shooting Stars: Sheila, Hélène, Sonia and Xenia

PORTRAITS
PORTRAITS

La photographie et le surréalisme au féminin : Cahun, Maar, Miller, Medkova
Photography and Women Surrealists: Cahun, Maar, Miller, and Medkova

Maya Deren

Autoportrait en Daphné
Self-Portrait as Daphne