Sisters of the revolution.

The female surrealists on show in Manchester Art Gallery’s Angels of Anarchy exhibition were much more than objects of desire, finds Jessica Lack

The artist Leonor Fini never liked André Breton, the zealously domineering leader of the Surrealist movement. ‘He was notorious for underestimating the talents of women associated with his group,’ she said in an interview with her biographer Peter Webb in the 1990s, and it is thus tempting to blame him for the lack of recognition they suffered. Breton often dismissed their contributions, describing them simply as models or muses (something many of them had started out as) and overpowering their ideas with his male interpretations. Undoubtedly, the most significant of them all was Meret Oppenheim, whose famous fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon Breton wrongly interpreted as a symbol of fetishistic desire.

‘Breton did not take me seriously as an artist,’ said Fini, ‘he showed more appreciation when I arrived at the café one day wearing pink silk cardinal’s stockings…For Breton, this was evidence of a laudable combination of anti-clericism and transvestism, although I had worn them merely because I loved the colour.’

A new exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery seeks to re-address and re-interpret the work of the female artists associated with Surrealism. Called Angels of Anarchy, it reveals a gutsy group of women, unconstrained by societal conventions, who sacrificed all in their desire to become artists. Much of the time these women were forced to operate on the outskirts of the movement they had attached themselves to, creating empowering images of womanhood which challenged Surrealism’s conventional belief that sexual desire was something men felt and women embodied. Perhaps because of their greater sacrifice, many of these women preferred to walk alone – there is certainly no hint that anything like a sisterhood existed among these intense individuals.

In fact, their lives were often tragically isolated. Female artists seem conspicuously absent from the vibrant discussions over apéritifs at Café Les Deux Magots, often only appearing in reference to orgiastic parties or adulterous bed-hopping in their quest for survival. Many of them were beautiful and were only too aware of the sexual power they wielded over their male contemporaries. Lee Miller was quite blatant in her pursuit of Man Ray, while Fini was more than happy to allow Ernst to trail after her like a love-sick puppy (to the misery of his long suffering wife.) A quick survey of their lives reveals a litany of alcohol abuse, suicide and depression because, in their later years, they were robbed of the creative freedom they cherished. Yet for all this they rightly remain totems to female emancipation.

This exhibition comes at an interesting time in feminist politics. Recently, Harriet Harman was accused of ‘vacuous feminism’ for using her time as leader (while Gordon Brown was on holiday) to raise awareness of women’s issues. She said at the time that she had been warned not to ‘start going on about women or they’ll just pigeonhole you as just going on about women’. It is a paradox that all high-profile women face and one in particular that the women of the Surrealist movement were forced to confront in the mid-to-late 20th century when they were raised up as figureheads for the feminist movement.

When the critics Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker tried to claim the female Surrealists as their own in their feminist text Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology in 1981, Fini violently repudiated the notion. ‘I am not a feminist,’ she said. ‘I hate being claimed as a feminist. I am not pleased to be included in books on feminist artists. I am a painter, not a woman painter. I am independent.’

Dorothea Tanning, meanwhile, categorically refused to be called a ‘woman artist’, though she is widely quoted as saying that being married to Max Ernst was, professionally speaking, ‘one strike against me’. Even Miller was insistent that gender politics held no interest for her, though her photographs, one of which includes a severed breast served up on a dinner plate, were almost explicit in their investigation of such issues. Miller’s portrait of Max Ernst looming over the tiny Tanning (taken at their ranch in Arizona) could easily be seen as an ironic comment on their differing stature as artists.

But it was the fear and frustration of being labeled – to the detriment of their artistic reputation – that these free spirits objected to. What the female artists of the Surrealist movement valued more than anything was their independence, an exotic rarity for women at the time. This desire went beyond their creativity into every aspect of their lives. To be ‘pigeonholed’, as Harman put it, as going on about women’s issues in their art would have been seen not only as a failure of their autonomy but of their success.

Angels of Anarchy opens on 26 September (until 10 January 2010). £6/£4 entry (under 18s free). Jessica Lack is an arts writer for The Guardian, she also writes for various magazines including Dazed and Confused and ID Magazine. Her book Tate Guide to Modern Art Terms, written in collaboration with Simon Wilson, was recently published by Tate Publishing and she is currently working on a book about a composer for Fourth Estate.

Images (top to bottom): On Being An Angel (1977) by Francesca Woodman, courtesy of George and Betty Woodman and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. L’Esprit Saint (1962) by Jane Graverol, courtesy Private collection, Dilbeek, Belgium © DACS 2009

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