Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Louise Bourgeois

Description

Frida Kahlo was just one of them: between 1930 and the 1960s many more women artists contributed to the Surrealist movement than has hitherto been assumed. The male Surrealists surrounding Andre Breton mostly saw them only as partners or models, but this volume shows how much more these women artists had to offer. The dominant topic of male Surrealists was woman as goddess, she-devil, doll, fetish, child-woman, android, and dream creature. The women artists of Surrealism, on the other hand, were searching for a new female identity and incidentally discovered their own language of forms. And then there was the examination of political topics, literature and foreign myths. Painting, drawing, objects, photography and films complement each other to create an overall picture of the surreal and fanciful creative work of the women artists of the avant-garde from all over the world.

L. Kirsten Degel is a curator at the Louisana Museum of Modern Art Humlebaek. Ingrid Pfeiffer is an art historian and curator of the renowned exhibition house Schirn Kunsthalle in Germany. Her publications include Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic, Richard Gerstl, and En Passant.

"Stunningly illustrated to reveal the ways in which writing, drawing, painting, photography, collage, and related media drew on the subconscious, dreams, chance, metamorphosis, literature, and spiritual beliefs to shed light on the artists and on the politics of the day, Fantastic Women shows women celebrating subversion as active participants of surrealism as the movement spanned Europe and North and Central America. Thoroughly researched and beautifully presented with ample photographs and artist biographies, the catalogue is a stunning accomplishment and an invaluable addition to scholarship. It will be of interest to scholars of women and gender studies and cultural studies, as well as those researching surrealism, the avant-garde, and early 20th-century art history." * Choice *