"Art, poetry is the precipitate of beauty in emotion. There have only ever been two driving emotions for humans: Love and Freedom."
Jacqueline Lamba’s very life illustrates the difficult position of women in the world of artistic creation: she spent her life fighting to have her own voice recognized. She lived during a time of great artistic, literary, and political upheaval in the 20th century, crossing paths with many of its most prominent figures. Though she was indeed the wife of André Breton and the mother of his only daughter, the artist Aube Elléouët, she was above all a remarkably talented artist with exceptional sensitivity.
Beautiful and rebellious, free-spirited and defiant of conservative values, she was the ideal muse for the Surrealists. She maintained close ties with the major artists and intellectuals of the century—Artaud, Duchamp, Ernst, Picasso, Sartre, Trotsky... A friend of Dora Maar and Frida Kahlo, she shared with them a life marked by an uncompromising desire for freedom.
While Jacqueline Lamba’s early works were influenced by Symbolism, her style evolved after she returned to painting in 1941, during her stay in the United States. Her artistic explorations embraced automatism and abstraction in a geometric cosmos where light—a recurring theme in her work—crystallizes and generates a subtle palette, perhaps touched by memories of the North American landscapes.
In a note, Jacqueline Lamba wrote “1948: no longer painting surrealist,” a clear break—she destroyed and scraped away many of her works—marking a practice defined by numerous formal reinventions. Her painting is devoted to light, transparency, and imperceptible movement—the invisible forces that govern our environment.
