Surrealist women artists and mental illness

Surrealists idealized feminine madness for its purportedly unfettered access to the unconscious. At the same time, an unusually large number of surrealist women artists, including Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, experienced mental illness. Die these women find the dream of feminized, mad genius prohibitive—or productive?
Female mental illness has been a prominent and complicated theme in surrealist cultural traditions, including the idealization of women with mental illness in works such as André Breton’s Nadja (1928). Art historians have examined this tendency before, but to date there has been no comprehensive study of the lived reality of women surrealist artists with mental illness. How did women’s experience and their work intersect with this romanticized vision? Was the masculine dream of feminized, “mad” genius prohibitive or productive for these women artists? After establishing the ideological field within which these women worked, the book turns to case studies of well-known and some lesser-known artists, including Ángeles Santos, Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, Claude Cahun, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Sonja Sekula, and Unica Zürn. This collection of essays contains a wide range of responses, revealing surrealism’s generative as well as restrictive force.

Contributor: Jenny Anger (Edited by)

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