Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation

This catalogue will expand upon the themes explored in the exhibition of the same name, originating at the List Art Center in April 1998 and travelling to the Miami Art Museum and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through 1998 and 1999. The exhibition explores the relevance of the Surrealist aesthetic to women artists from the 1930s and intervening generations to its continued relevance to contemporary artists. The contributors reexamine art historical assumptions about gender, identity, and intergenerational legacies within modernist and postmodernist frameworks. Questions raised include: how did women in 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? Essays by Dawn Ades, Whitney Chadwick, Salomon Grimberg, Katy Kline, Helaine Posner, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Dickran Tashjian. Edited by Whitney Chadwick, author of Myth in Surrealist Painting (1980) and Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985).