The problem with women.

Louisa Buck reviews the female Surrealists on show in Angels of Anarchy – and finds women turning the tables to create artistic objects of desire

‘The problem of women,’ declared Andre Breton, the French writer and founder of the Surrealist movement in 1929, ‘is the most marvellous and disturbing problem in the world.’ Certainly, no other artistic grouping has been as obsessed with women, but while the Surrealists may have stated that ‘women should be free and adored’, the role of these idealised females tended to be as passive muses and fuellers of fantasies rather than as active participants. In art as in life sexual hierarchies persisted, and according to Dorothea Tanning, the wife of leading surrealist artist Max Ernst, ‘the place of women among the Surrealists was no different from that which they occupied among the population in general’.

Yet amidst this prejudice and against the odds many women did manage to function as artists as well as ornaments – and it is high time that their contribution was properly recognised. Not only was Tanning consort to Ernst, she was also a remarkable artist in her own right, and her Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, a highly disquieting painting of 1943 in which two small girls in strangely shredded clothes are stalked by a giant sunflower, is one of over a hundred haunting images presented in Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism currently on show at Manchester Art Gallery. This fascinating exhibition, the first of its kind in Europe, brings many long overlooked female practitioners of the 1930s and 1940s in from decades of obscurity and places them firmly centre stage. It also demonstrates that the Surrealist influence and legacy stretched way beyond the movement’s early heyday to have a direct influence on women artists worldwide: the French-Canadian Mimi Parent or the Czech artist Eva Svankmajerova, for example, made making Surrealist inspired works through to the 1970s (and even well into the 1990s).

The exhibition takes its title from the English artist Eileen Agar’s Angel of Anarchy (1936-40), an ominously opulent sculpture of a head which looms by the entrance like a sinister sentinel, suffocatingly swathed and doubly blindfolded by layers of richly embroidered oriental sashes. Sprouting feathers and almost excruciatingly smothered by its opulent wrappings, this fetishistic object is just one example of how these women turned the tables on their male counterparts to produce their own artistic objects of desire. Male and female morph and mingle in Ithell Colquhoun’s painting of two fleshily phallic rocks rising out of a glassy sea that frame a suggestively female cleft, while at the same time resembling as a pair of giant looming thighs ending in a pubic tuft of seaweed at their base. It is a tantalising subtext to this show that the high octane eroticism and inventive challenging of sexual stereotypes of much early female surrealist work fed directly into the more overtly feminist statements of future generations such as the militant 1970s collages of Penny Slinger, in which an open mouth is grotesquely gagged by a pearl-adorned ear or stuffed with a succession of suggestively genital lips.

One of the striking features of Angels of Anarchy is the mischievousness with which traditional artistic categories are subverted and reinvented. Landscapes are no longer idyllic or picturesque but instead teem with tumescent rocks, sinister pools and bizarrely-behaving plants and animals. Often, nature is completely absent, as in the empty post-apocalyptic scenes of Czech artist Toyen or the bleak expanses painted by American Kay Sage, which are populated only by peculiar geometric structures and ghostly fluttering drapery. Nor is there any refuge to be found indoors. In direct rebellion against what has always been regarded as the female domain, domestic interiors now become places not of nurture but of nightmare, where walls collapse, taps cascade hair and eyeballs float through the air. Here beds act as the resting place for bones, as in a sinister little painting by the Belgian Jane Graverol or, courtesy of Eva Svankmarjerova, they unfold in an ominously genital and predatory manner.

Particular liberties are taken with the still life, another time-honoured theme much beloved by lady painters. Swiss-German artist Meret Oppenheim is one of Surrealism’s better known female names, but here her iconic fur-covered tea cup and saucer is represented by a wall mounted replica, which she dismissively calls Souvenir of Breakfast in Fur. Instead, prominence is given to a later and lesser known companion-piece produced when she was sixty years old, which kinkily plays with more masculine connotations of liquid and fur by presenting a frothing beer mug sprouting a perkily erect squirrel’s tail. But the most unsettling image of the show comes from Lee Miller, who photographs an amputated breast neatly laid on a plate as if for consumption, complete with knife, fork and chequered place mat. A former fashion model and assistant-muse to Man Ray, who then went on to become a leading photo-journalist in her own right, Miller was undoubtedly drawing on her own experience as an object of scrutiny when she secretly took this macabre picture in the offices of Vogue – the ultimate bible of female style and beauty upon whose pages she had so regularly appeared.

As well as presenting the work of women directly involved in Surrealism, Angels of Anarchy also includes a number of figures whose connections with the movement were more tenuous. The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, whose painfully personal still lives and self portraits have made her a household name, may have been described as Surrealist by Andre Breton (who in a rare recognition of female creativity organised her first exhibition in New York in 1939) but she remained resolutely independent of any artistic association. ‘I paint my own reality,’ she declared. ‘I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.’ Likewise Claude Cahun’s series of photographic self portraits dating from the 1920s, in which she radically alters her appearance and gender to act out an array of different identities (angel, body builder, skinhead or vamp). These may be in keeping with Surrealism’s fascination with fluidity and transformation but they make her at best a fellow traveller, as do Francesca Woodman’s photographs and films made in America in the 1970s in which her ghostly presence blends and sometimes almost vanishes into decaying domestic interiors.

But it is also utterly appropriate to Surrealism’s love of flux and its loathing of rigid pigeonholing that Angels of Anarchy presents such a wide and open-ended view. For what this important and long overdue exhibition clearly demonstrates is that the relationship of women to the Surrealist movement was rich, complicated and varied dramatically according to each individual artist. As such it gave rise to some of the most challenging and original images to be seen anywhere within the history of art.

Angels of Anarchy runs until 10 January 2010. £6/£4 entry (under 18s free). Louisa Buck is contemporary art correspondent for The Art Newspaper, a regular reviewer for the BBC and the author of several books including ‘Moving Targets; a User’s Guide to British Art Now’ Tate, 2000 and Owning Art: The Contemporary Art Collector’s Handbook (with Judith Greer) Cultureshock, 2006. She was a judge for the 2005 Turner Prize.

Images (top to bottom): Diego and Frida (1929 – 1944), Frida Kahlo, © Banco de Mexico Deigo Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico DF / DACS 2009. Severed breast from radical surgery in a place setting (c. 1930), Lee Miller, © Lee Miller Archives, England. All rights reserved.

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