“Down the Rabbit Hole”: A Journey into Twentieth Century Women’s Surrealist Art
By Willow Rector
Have you ever fallen down a rabbit hole? Have you ever turned a little too quickly, too sharply, and felt your whole world slip sideways, leaving you lost and longing to escape, like Alice in Wonderland? Entering the Los Angles County Museum of Art’s recent exhibition, In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, I was dizzied by its sheer size, scale, and luminosity. As I read the curatorial statements that prefaced the exhibition, I began to question the reasons behind the decision to recreate the wondrous landscape of chaos and beauty, creativity and dislocation, populated by the women surrealists in the last century.
And then I met the White Rabbit.
Dorothea Tanning’s lustrous self-portrait, Birthday (1942), stands at the entrance to the exhibition, and arguably serves as a touchstone for the experience that follows. Standing in aclassic ¾ pose with one hand on the knob of an infinite series of doors, she hovers between theconfinement of tradition and an eloquent expansion of her own creative power, her own potential. The composition of the painting amplifies this ambiguity. We are unsure whether she has already passed through the doorway, or whether she is preparing to take a journey. We do not know whether the beautiful roots composing her skirt are atrophying her body—freezing her in time—or whether they signify metamorphosis—a new life. For Tanning, space is entirely subjective, so a door is not just a door, but also an invitation to follow and engage, no matter where your eye and imagination may lead. The acknowledgement of that kind of freedom, thatkind of power, is both invigorating and terrifying. However, no challenge faced by these women encapsulated a greater risk, or a more promising reward, than the genre of surrealism itself.
Advice from a Caterpillar:
In Chapter 5 of Alice in Wonderland, Alice has a rather frustrating conversation about change with a caterpillar, itself a metaphor for transformation. When Alice cannot answer the question, “who are YOU?” because her identity was always defined by others, the Caterpillar provides asimple answer: we are who we decide to be. This tale echoes throughout much of the exhibit. While the father of surrealism, André Breton, attempted to limit these women to the role of “femme-enfant,” they chose another narrative that within their cultural contexts seemed impossible. They chose to become artists themselves.
Despite the complications of their lives as the wives and lovers of major surrealist artists, each one of these women took a risk. Rather than being silenced, they employed one of surrealism’s core strengths—the persistent questioning of ‘reality’—to erode the misogynist and patriarchal underpinnings of the doctrine, and thereby set themselves free. The consequence of their decision to validate themselves as artists was the production of a wealth of art examining, constructing, and imagining a host of multivalent identities.
“Who in the World Am I?”:
Their experiences of being objectified by other artists imbued these women with unique understandings of subjectivity. Much of the work in the exhibition is self-referential, and often employs the theme of doubling in order to comment on the multiple roles and identities women artists were expected to juggle. Although the most famous example of this technique is Kahlo’s Las dos Fridas (1939), one of the most poignant is Helen Lundeberg’s Double Portrait of the Artist in Time (1935).
The mirroring between the adult artist and the portrait of herself as a child, each of which is arguably the creation of the other, initiates a complex and fruitful dialogue on the nature of the relationship between self and other, past and present, an artist and her history. Indeed, as each ofthese women transformed their “personal nightmares [into] painted dreams,” 1 they used the cathartic impulse at the heart of surrealism to explode gender roles and to dislocate reality in
pursuit of personal revelation.
What the Gryphon Is Guarding:
In Carroll’s story, a gryphon guards the Queen of Heart’s most valuable treasure: a mock turtle who shares his secret of having once been real. While the women surrealists resisted patriarchal oppression by asserting their own creative processes, like the turtle they also sought to excavate something authentic from the rubble: the sublime. This quintessential surrealist intermingling of Eros and Thanatos, despair and ecstasy, invests each of the images in the exhibition with apoignant and powerful reality.
How beauty, tragedy, oppression, and the thirst for freedom pigments the portraits of each of our lives remains to be seen, but in a time when artists’ abilities to make art are more curtailed every day, the persistence and strength of these women is palpable. As I walked out of the exhibition hall, I, like Alice, had one last question:
“Would you tell me, please, which way to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you decide to get,” said the Cheshire Cat.
1. Fort, Ilene Susan. “In the Land of Reinvention: The United States.” In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and
the United States. Eds. Ilene Susan Fort and Tere Arcq with Terri Geis. Munich: DelMonico Books, 2012. 44.
Willow Rector is a textile artist whose work focuses on mixed media explorations of therelationship between literary and visual art. She is a current participant in the MAWA Foundation Mentorship Program.
In Wonderland was exhibited at the Los Angles County Museum of Art from January 29 – May 6, 2012. It is currently showing at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec in Québec City until September 3, 2012. It will then travel to Mexico City where it will be shown at the Museo de Arte Moderno from September 27, 2012 – January 13, 2013.