Elizabeth Perrotte
Dream On: Women and Surrealism

Surrealism feels urgent again. In the past decade, major museum exhibitions and academic publications have brought fresh insights into surrealism as a global art movement. They have also highlighted the extent of innovative, creative surrealist work produced by unsung women artists such as Dora Maar, Jacqueline Lamba, Claude Cahun, Toyen, Leonora Carrington, Unica Zürn, Méret Oppenheim, Eileen Agar, Dorothea Tanning, and Ithell Colquhoun. Women associated with surrealism found creative strategies to navigate between challenging personal and professional lives in turbulent times. Their works sought means to “become otherwise,” i.e., free from dominant gender stereotypes and oppressive social frameworks. Whilst surrealist manifestoes presented the movement as revolutionary and counter-cultural, a means to overthrow repressive bourgeois values and institutions, surrealist organisations remained dominated by men. Women were celebrated as muses and models whose main role was to inspire male desire and creativity. This lecture hopes to redress those assumptions. We will consider how surrealist art by women has become significant for us today, offering ways to expand senses and imaginations to change relations between the “thinkable, sayable, and knowable” (Jacques Rancière).