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Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation
""Mirror Images" is a welcome successor to Whitney Chadwick's significant work on the hitherto neglected history of women and surrealism. An impressive list of contributors explores the byways, bringing this tragic, funny, and engrossing story up to recent times."
-- Lucy Lippard, author of "The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art" During the 1930s and 1940s, women artists associated with the Surrealist movement produced a significant body of self-images that have no equivalent among the works of their male colleagues. While male artists exalted Woman's otherness in fetishized images, women artists explored their own subjective worlds. The self-images of Claude Cahun, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Remedios Varo, Kay Sage, and others both internalize and challenge conventions for representing femininity, the female body, and female subjectivity. Many of the representational strategies employed by these pioneers continue to resonate in the work of contemporary women artists. The words "Surrealist" and "surrealism" appear frequently in discussions of such contemporary artists as Louise Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, Kiki Smith, Dorothy Cross, Michiko Kon, and Paula Santiago. This book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, explores specific aspects of the relationship between historic and contemporary work in the context of Surrealism. The contributors reexamine art historical assumptions about gender, identity, and intergenerational legacies within modernist and postmodernist frameworks. Questions raised include: how did womenin both groups draw from their experiences of gender and sexuality? What do contemporary artistic practices involving the use of body images owe to the earlier examples of both female and male Surrealists? What is the relationship between self-image and self- knowledge?
Contributors: Dawn Ades, Whitney Chadwick, Salomon Grimberg, Katy Kline, Helaine Posner, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Dickran Tashjian.
-- Lucy Lippard, author of "The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art" During the 1930s and 1940s, women artists associated with the Surrealist movement produced a significant body of self-images that have no equivalent among the works of their male colleagues. While male artists exalted Woman's otherness in fetishized images, women artists explored their own subjective worlds. The self-images of Claude Cahun, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Remedios Varo, Kay Sage, and others both internalize and challenge conventions for representing femininity, the female body, and female subjectivity. Many of the representational strategies employed by these pioneers continue to resonate in the work of contemporary women artists. The words "Surrealist" and "surrealism" appear frequently in discussions of such contemporary artists as Louise Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, Kiki Smith, Dorothy Cross, Michiko Kon, and Paula Santiago. This book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, explores specific aspects of the relationship between historic and contemporary work in the context of Surrealism. The contributors reexamine art historical assumptions about gender, identity, and intergenerational legacies within modernist and postmodernist frameworks. Questions raised include: how did womenin both groups draw from their experiences of gender and sexuality? What do contemporary artistic practices involving the use of body images owe to the earlier examples of both female and male Surrealists? What is the relationship between self-image and self- knowledge?
Contributors: Dawn Ades, Whitney Chadwick, Salomon Grimberg, Katy Kline, Helaine Posner, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Dickran Tashjian.
191 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1998
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About the author
Whitney Chadwick
33 books56 followersWhitney Chadwick is a professor emerita at San Francisco State University. She has published on issues of gender and sexuality in surrealism, modernism, and contemporary art. Her book Women, Art, and Society (Thames and Hudson, 1990; fifth revised and updated edition, 2011) explores the history of women’s contributions to visual culture from the Middle Ages to the 21st century through an examination of the intersection of class, gender, race, and sexuality with culture, geography, politics, and criticism.
Chadwick received her PhD from the Pennsylvania State University. In 2003, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Gothenburg. Her research has been supported by fellowships at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Forum for Advanced Studies in Arts, Languages, and Theology at Uppsala University.
(from https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/peo...)
Chadwick received her PhD from the Pennsylvania State University. In 2003, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Gothenburg. Her research has been supported by fellowships at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Forum for Advanced Studies in Arts, Languages, and Theology at Uppsala University.
(from https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/peo...)
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