Spirituality, mythology and symbolism drawn from the ancient realm often inspired them. The female Surrealists took these problematic representations in their stride, creating work in reaction to their social conditions and expanding the boundaries of Surrealist iconography in the process. Courtesy: Collection of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, Berlin, © The Estate of Dorothea Tanning/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020 photograph: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin She is a projection of their collective erotic reverie.ĭorothea Tanning, Voltage, 1942, oil on canvas. In René Magritte’s collage I do not see the hidden in the forest (1929), a nude woman forms the centre of the composition, surrounded by a border comprised of photographs of 16 male Surrealist artists. In his second manifesto, written in 1929, Breton declared: ‘The problem of woman is the most marvellous and disturbing problem in all the world.’ The female form was at the heart of the Surrealist project, and women – regarded as subjects, muses and sex symbols by their male peers – were frequently cast as objects of desire or mystery. The Surrealists celebrated the unconscious mind as a means to bypass reason, overthrow the oppressive rules of society and unlock their repressed desires or fantasies.

The Surrealist movement was founded in Paris by the writer and poet André Breton with the publication of his Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). The ‘acceptance’ of women into male-dominated artistic circles is a complex and nuanced question that has been explored by feminist art historians since the 1970s. In later interviews, she admitted to feeling then ‘as if millennia of discrimination against women were resting on my shoulders, as if embodied in my feelings of inferiority’. She entered an intense period of self-doubt and didn’t resume making art until the 1950s. Having moved to the city from Basel in 1932, at the age of 18, to study painting at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse, she remembered that: ‘For us women, Surrealism represented a world in which we could rebel against the conventions of our upbringing, and in which imagination was a key to a more liberated life o f course, the dominance of men in the Surrealist group was the same as everywhere else, but with the difference that they accepted women as artists without prejudice.’ Struggling to support herself and suffering a crisis of artistic confidence, against the turbulence of pre-war Europe and the rise of Nazism, Oppenheim returned to Switzerland in 1937. In IMAGO: Méret Oppenheim (1988) – a feature-length portrait of the German-born Swiss artist by Pamela Robertson-Pearce and Anselm Spoerri – Oppenheim (voiced by British actress Glenda Jackson) reflects on her experience within the Surrealist circle of Paris.

Surreal Objects by Ingrid Pfeiffer