In 2002 Dorothea Tanning stated “I guess I’ll be called a surrealist forever, like a tattoo: D. Loves S.». As a young artist she found an exciting world of possibility in Surrealism, as an elderly one she recognised her name would always be associated with it. Embracing the call to liberate the world from what André Breton termed “the reign of logic” in the first surrealist manifesto of 1924, Tanning’s art exemplifies how women artists turned to Surrealism and then took the aesthetic of the sur-real in directions far beyond the confines of Breton’s writings. Tanning, alongside Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini and others of their generation put Surrealism in the service of women, advancing its interests in the unconscious, mythology, magic, and desire. In place of the traditionally prescribed role of muse for both the woman artist and the woman in the artwork, they mapped new tales featuring fantastic figures,landscapes or animals wherein woman was always an active agent.
Distraction, whether in the form of a naked limb, enigmatic face, hybrid animal or liquid landscape that seems to move before eyes, unites these artists’ work. Distraction serves to undermine the rational world in which we live and lure us into a Surrealist one of constant wonder and metamorphosis instead. Women artists turned to the concept of distraction not simply as a prop or style but as a philosophical world view: it defies the idea that there is only one way of looking at, of mastering, life. If the first Surrealist manifesto quoted Charles Baudelaire in describing woman as “the most wonderful and disturbing problem there is in the world”, then these women Surrealists magnified that problematic, enigmatic, and ever-distracting power.
Distraction involves the agitation of the mind and senses, when distracted we find it impossible to think of one thing alone. As Walter Benjamin noted in his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, distraction is the opposite state to contemplation, where we focus and look inwards and have a solipsistic experience. In Surrealist terms, we might say that distraction ensures the art spills out beyond the canvas and gallery space to poetically contaminate the crowd, activate new experiences, and breed further distraction.
The canvases, drawings, and sculptures in this exhibition model new possibilities for our appreciation of the world as they give form to poetic distraction through line, colour and form to lure us into a world of fantastic storytelling.
Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, and Dorothea Tanning played critical roles in Surrealism’s expansion beyond the movement’s initial focus on the automatic text and image in the aftermath of World War I, through to the bold new directions it took across literature, painting, costume design, and sculptures at the time of World War II and in the decades after.
These women artists won early, global recognition through their inclusion in major international exhibitions, including Alfred Barr’s Fantastic Art Dada, Surrealism exhibition at the MoMA in New York in 1936 and the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris in 1947 and in 1959. They continue to be recognised as key figures of the avant-garde as evidenced in their inclusion in the 59th Venice Biennale dedicated to The Milk of Dreams (April 23 -November 27, 2022) and the Centre Pompidou’s Surréalisme centennial exhibition in Paris today (September 4, 2024 – January 13, 2025). The art of Carrington, Fini and Tanning is highly individual, of course, but they shared a Surrealist world view across their long careers as they defied the expectations of the art market and society in their art and life choices.
Carrington was the most openly feminist, asserting in 1976, “[A] woman should not have to demand Rights. The Rights were there from the beginning, they must be Taken Back Again, including the mysteries which were ours and which were violated, stolen, or destroyed.” At the same time, her female comrades defied gender binaries in their work and asserted the same rights in their own ways. Fini once explained “I am in favor of a world where there is little or no sex distinction”, while Tanning wrote about the challenges of being “an artist living in the shadow of a great man [Max Ernst]” until the 1950s when a “steady light shone” on her as an artist working, and critically recognised, in Paris.
Surrealism in the Service of Distraction brings Leonora Carrington’s occultist Surrealism (Composition (Ur of the Chaldees), 1950) and mythical sculptures (The Palmist, 2010), Leonor Fini’s erotic drawings (Juliette, 1944) and Dorothea Tanning’s kaleidoscopic landscapes (Chiens ombragés, 1959) into conversation in the spirit of the friendship they enjoyed as well as the idea of the wider collective spirit of Surrealism. Between Carrington’s half-woman, half-bird Palmist whose ginkgo crown denotes her resilience and whose palms denote her magical powers, Fini’s celebration of the D.A.F de Sade’s libertine Juliette as she ecstatically dines on human flesh, and Tanning’s crystalised canvas of half-human half-canine limbs splintering into a palette of oranges, blues and reds, we find time slipping across ancestral, literary,and modern moments.
This exhibition also explores the legacy of that Surrealist spirit by bringing three younger female artists into the conversation. In this way, one generation informs and distracts the other and Surrealism’s refusal of any linear, logical, his-story is beautifully replaced with a her-story that refuses to be tidily labelled or categorised. The paintings of Sara Anstis exploit the haptic sensuality of the medium of pastel and revel in making the familiar scene strange. In Sleepers (2024), animals and humans share an intimacy that is quietly, suggestively, erotic, not unlike Tanning’s playful incorporation of Lhasa Apso terriers as a child or lover substitute in her canvases.
In Swim (2024) and Reciprocal (2024), Piper Bangs expands the Surrealists’ fascination with the still-life as she teases out the idea of ‘forbidden’ fruit. Pretty phallic pears hover between states of play and collapse as they are staged in curiously liquid landscapes. Marrying the vache period of René Magritte with the erotic humour of Toyen, Bangs takes the humble genre of the still-life, traditionally associated with the female painter, in gloriously fetishistic directions. Ginny Casey also ensures Sigmund Freud’s reading of the symbolism of dream takes a feminist edge in The Big Listen (2022) and Amphibious Vessel (2022).
The psychoanalyst saw all vessels, from a spoon or box to a ship, as a symbol of the female sex organ and interpreted the appearance of a room in a dream as a symbol of the desired woman, waiting to be entered. Casey’s animated, amphibious vessels wreak havoc on such Freudian symbolism and the male’s fear and fantasy of the femme-fatale as inanimate objects dance and gesture like eager lovers in domestic rooms. If Carrington once described the kitchen as “a place of power” then here it is a place of play.
The Surrealist echo is palpable in these younger artists’ use of distraction to explore space, sexuality, and storytelling. Through almost naïve styles and compositions that may recall illustrations in children’s books they ensure distraction lies in the overlooked as well as in the immersive. As different generations of artists meet in Surrealism in the Service of Distraction viewers are invited to enjoy distraction at its fullest.
- Alyce Mahon, Paris, 2024
