The large number of self-portraits by female Surrealists-compared to a mere handful by their male counterparts-provides the springboard for the exhibition.
On the one hand, the patriarchal, some would say misogynistic, ideologies of Surrealism tended to objectify women before a fetishistic male gaze, while on the other, Surrealism’s subversive attitudes towards the Church, State and family provoked women to question their traditional roles in society.įeminist art historian Whitney Chadwick, professor of art at San Francisco State University and curator of “Mirror images: women, Surrealism, and self-representation”, explains, “Surrealism became the first modernist movement in which a group of women could explore female subjectivity and give form, however tentatively, to a feminine imagery”. The relationship between women artists and the Surrealist movement hangs on an intriguing contradiction.
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