Point d’Interrogation: An Exhibition as Opening

To reach Surréalisme au féminin? at the Musée de Montmartre, one first had to climb Montmartre’s looming hilltop, the cobblestone streets, and labyrinthine alleyways, where many of the artists whose works were on display in the exhibition had established their studios over the years. There, between a small vineyard and a garden only open to cats, the survey curated by Alix Agret and Dominique Païni with Saskia Ooms brought together around 150 works by 49 artists. The title, with its provocative question mark, aimed to indicate and cultivate an underlying suspense around an exhibition conceived as a hypothesis rather than a demonstration. A non-comprehensive, partly subjective inventory, it addressed what might be the “feminine” part of Surrealism.

In addition to the above proposition, outlined in the exhibition’s opening wall text, a further short text to the side, next to the doorway leading into the first room, underscored Surrealism’s international nature and the exhibition project’s inherent limitations of scope. Addressing these upfront, the exhibition was explicitly placed in dialogue with recent presentations on global Surrealism and Surrealist women artists, such as Surrealism Beyond Borders (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern, 2021–22) and Fantastic Women (Schirn Kunsthalle and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2020). Upon entering the first room, viewers were greeted by a wall of portrait photographs of the exhibited artists, each accompanied by the artist’s name and—instead of biographical information—a quote reflecting their artistic position and attitude towards Surrealism. This overwhelming mass of faces constituted a strong visual statement, making the implicit argument that women artists were not merely exceptions within the wider Surrealist movement. To this end, without recourse to hierarchy or canonization, the exhibition set out to emphasize their individuality and plurality of personal vision.

In addition to a handful of loans from major French and international museums, most works on show were loaned from private collections—the fruit of the exhibition organizers’ extensive research. As a result, many artists were included who are rarely seen in other Surrealist survey exhibitions, such as Elsa Thorensen, Anne Éthuin, Marion Adnams, Josette Exandier, and Myriam Bat-Yosef, to name just a few. Whilst the geographical focus of the exhibition—including the regions of Belgium, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and the Czech Republic—did not challenge familiar geographies of Surrealism explored in previous exhibitions, the long-durée view of the movement presented—with works produced between the 1930s and early 2000s—authentically reflected the long lifespans of many of the artists on view and in many cases demonstrated these artists’ visual and conceptual continuity over time.

Thematic sections explored Metamorphosis, Nature, Femininities, Chimeras, Architectures, Nighttime and Interiority, and Abstractions. The wall labels accompanying the individual works were intently focused on the work, through visual analysis and reflection on the creative process of the artist, with a QR code in the corner of each label giving visitors the opportunity to read the biography of the artist. As such, refreshingly, biographical interpretation did not dominate discussion of the works. The different spaces flowed seamlessly into one another as one wandered into small rooms and up dwindling staircases, slowly, carefully turning corners, as if indeed in someone’s house, encountering previously unseen treasure after treasure. The dark navy and blood red walls, in combination with atmospheric lighting, directed one’s gaze towards the works and quotations on the walls. The latter were interspersed with the curatorial voice, producing a polyphony of statements and plurality of positions. Through the integration of excerpts from the artists’ literary works (in the form of bilingual wall texts), in addition to the inclusion in the exhibition of copies of books and volumes, the curators achieved a physical presence for their writings and poems, in turn demonstrating the multimedia practice of many of the artists and the interactions of themes across literary and visual works. The curatorial choices in the exhibition space thus underscored the multifariousness of these artists’ varied contributions to an artistic phenomenon that cannot be defined, studied, or presented without them.

While Surréalisme au féminin? was formulated as a question rather than a closed argument for a specific kind of “feminine surrealism”, part of its reflective, interrogative nature was lost in the accompanying catalogue. While the curators there judge the claim of “Surrealist” women or men to be essentializing, they do not condemn the idea of a “female” surrealism in the same way.1 The catalogue texts question the artists’ identification with Surrealism, but not the paramount emphasis placed on gender, over and above other factors such as nationality, class, or political orientation, when it comes to the artists’ work. What the curators conceptualize as “the uniqueness of a female surrealism”, essentially unified and implicitly distinct from a “male surrealism”—a point also made by previous “women surrealist” exhibitions—goes against the individuality and plurality of geography and closeness to the group that they are advocating.2 This is a result of the single-gender exhibition format, of what Eliza Goodpasture in an opinion piece for ArtReview aptly summarized as “The Problem With All-Women Exhibitions:” “whether intentionally or not, the visitor is asked to infer that the works’ traits, subject matter, and materials are stereotypically associated with femininity”.3

Can a single-gender exhibition, a history of Surrealism largely without men, go beyond a project of recovery and advance the conversations happening around Surrealism now? The format implicitly undermines the relativity of gender, which is not only part of “contemporary feminist issues,” as proposed in the catalogue, but had a bearing in the previous century and in the art of many of the artists presented.4 Not only did several of them refuse the label “woman artist,” but some of their identities, like Claude Cahun’s, might not have neatly matched the gender female/woman/feminine at all times.

A key appears to lie in the title of the exhibition, Surréalisme au féminin?, and in language. The differing, ambiguous meanings and connotations of “féminin/e” in French and “feminine” in English, especially in the context of feminist scholarship in the cultural field, point to two distinct feminist traditions in France and the Anglophone world.5 A challenge of the bilingual catalogue was the translation of the French “féminin/e” to English—it became “female,” carrying the weight of an implied essentialism that was perhaps unintended. The exhibition title, on the other hand, appears to have been deliberately left untranslated. I am wondering whether “female surrealism” would have been approved as an Anglophone exhibition title, or what the difference between “surréalisme au féminin,” “surréalisme féminin,” or “surrealism in the feminine” would be? The preposition appears to function as a distancing device in a determinative grammatical construction.

In the context of feminist scholarship in the field of Surrealism studies, the exhibition title cannot but evoke the idea of écriture féminine and of taking a different approach to surrealism. Because the word Surrealism itself in French is masculine, the title uses the masculine form of feminine: pointing to the nonsensical binary nature of gendered language that persists in many places. Abigail Susik recently asked, “How different might things be if instead th[e] neologism [surrealism] broke with the dictates of French grammar and was elected by the movement’s adherents to be a feminine noun, la surréalisme?”6 The exhibition title and the translation issue raise important questions around the relationships between Surrealism and genders and how they are conceptualized through language.

Surréalisme au féminin? with its opening question mark, holds the potential to constitute a point of interrogation within the field of Surrealism studies: an opening to ask the question of what feminist and queer-feminist Surrealist art histories can and should look like in the third decade of the 21st century. It offers the opportunity to question the implications of the “women artist” group exhibition format, and an impetus to discuss the dismantling of the monolith “woman” in our collective scholarship. Interrogative rather than exclamatory, these histories must continue to be written and curated.