Re-membering the body : reconstructing the female in surrealism /

Abstract

This thesis is a hybridized construct including both critical and creative writing in response to the body of surrealist art created by Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning. All three of these women worked within the medium of surrealism, and all three of them, in one way or another, have been overlooked by critics of that art form. Beyond their choice to represent life through surrealistic tactics, all of these women's artwork shares at least one thing in common. All of their work finds its center, its platform for representation, through the body: either their own bodies, women's bodies in general, the bodies of men and women, or through the bodies of androgynous characters. In their worlds, character's abound, strange streets teem with people, men and women engage in bizarre activities, but no matter how much the content of their paintings become irradiated with surreal representations, the human body and the human character remain as integral parts of that representation. Seen in the context of Modernist Surrealist art, this choice on their part to centralize their art's arguments around the human body or the human "character" is revolutionary, a critique of the Surrealist Movement itself, in which its male practitioners were fond of either dissecting the body, particularly the female body, or disappearing human figures from their landscapes altogether. Varo's, Carrington's and Tanning's paintings reveal not only a proto-feminist sensibility, examining the inner lives of women, but also a postmodern sensibility, in which science, reason and whole systems of knowledge become subjects for critique, for uncertainty.