In the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto, The New Orleans Museum of Art presents works by six women photographers whose work explores the subconscious mind, blurs the boundary between reality and dreams, or magnifies the uncanny in everyday life. Drawn from NOMA’s permanent collection, works by Ilse Bing, Ruth Bernhard, Lola Alvarez-Bravo, Carlotta M. Corpron, Florence Henri, and Lee Miller illustrate ways that women pushed the boundaries of surrealist art.
In 1924, French poet André Breton published the first Surrealist Manifesto, setting out ideologies and principles for writers and artists to engage and explore the unconscious mind. While Breton’s text launched Surrealism as a transcontinental movement, Breton’s conspicuous exclusion of work by women artists ignored the reality that women were advancing many of the artistic techniques associated with Surrealism. The title of this exhibition, Double Space, calls attention to some of these techniques, including the use of double exposures, mirrors and reflection, distorted figures, solarization, and multiples. Additionally, while male Surrealists often engaged with notions of the womanly muse as enchantress or childlike, many of the artists in this exhibition challenged these notions of by representing female figures as subjects of agency and queer desire, constructing an alternative to a masculinist uncanny.
Image: Untitled (Woman with Hand in Hair) 1931 © Lee Miller
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