Museo Nacional de Historia Natural

From the surrealist point of view, childhood is not a demeaning category.—

Penelope Rosemont, 1998¹⁵⁴

I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse... I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist. — Leonora Carrington, 1983¹⁵⁵

If woman were to be the male creator’s conduit to a transformed consciousness and to poetic creation, then in effect she would function as his muse. While the lovelorn Bedřich Feuerstein had proposed Toyen for the role of muse of Devětsil, the artist did not function as a traditional muse either in the 1920s or later, although it is clear others (Nezval, Štyrský, and Heisler, at a minimum) found her inspiring. How did her inspirational qualities relate to those of surrealist versions of the muse?

152 Interview with Leonora Carrington, 1983, quoted in Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists, 105.

153 This talk was given in May 1934 at a Levá fronta-sponsored public discussion of surrealism. Vítězslav Nezval,

“O surrealismu,” in Surrealismus v diskusi, ed. Ladislav Štoll and Karel Teige (Prague: Knihovna Levé fronty, 1934), 77–83.

154Rosemont, Surrealist Women, xlvii; Katharine Conley, Automatic Woman: The Representation of Women in Surrealism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 123.

155Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists, 66.

The childlike woman, or femme-enfant, is the form of muse that has attracted the most attention in recent scholarship, because it has generally been taken as an indicator of surrealism’s infantilizing view of women. There is certainly truth in this interpretation, as Péret’s words show:

The femme-enfant arouses the love of the totally virile man because she completes him trait for trait. This love reveals her to herself while projecting her into a marvelous world. [...] She waited for love like the blossoming of the sun and she welcomes it in the present, but more sumptuous than she had dreamed it.

She wears sublime love in strength, but it is necessary that it be revealed to her.¹⁵⁶

However, the mythic function of the femme-enfant differs from its prescriptive use. Throughout his work, Breton emphasized the importance of childhood and a childlike state of mind without reference to gender. In the First Manifesto, he wrote “It is perhaps childhood that comes closest to one’s ‘real life,’” and “The mind which plunges into Surrealism relives with glowing excitement the best part of its childhood.”¹⁵⁷ The extremely young women who joined surrealism in the 1930s—Meret Oppenheim, Gisèle Prassinos, Dora Maar, Leonora Carrington—were real-life models for the femme-enfant. As Penelope Rosemont suggests, rather than being an infantilized, helpless creature, the femme-enfant “refuses to surrender the child’s boldness, curiosity, and spirit of adventure.” Perhaps, since the surrealists embraced many other models of the uncommon woman, Rosemont is correct that the femme-enfant need not be a restrictive or sexist category.¹⁵⁸ All the same, Toyen herself does not seem to have been regarded as a femme-enfant.

156 “La femme-enfant suscite l’amour de l’homme totalement viril car elle le complète trait pour trait. Cet amour la révèle à elle-même en la projetant dans un monde merveilleux, aussi s’y abandonne-t-elle entièrement. [...] Elle attendait l’amour comme le bourgeon le soleil et elle l’accueille en présent inespéré, mais plus somptueux qu’elle ne l’avait rêvé. Elle porte l’amour sublime en puissance, mais il faut qu’il luis soit révélé.” Benjamin Péret, Anthologie de l’Amour Sublime (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1956), 27.

157Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924),” 39–40.

158Rosemont, Surrealist Women, xlvii; Conley, Automatic Woman, 123.

The image of Melusine, meanwhile, had been significant for Breton as early as his encounter with Nadja, but in his 1944 work Arcane 17, he began to develop a larger vision of male-female spheres, in which he postulated a more equal, non-patriarchal society. Though he regarded male and female as representing different aspects of human nature, he stressed the need to shift to “feminine” values.

Who will give the living scepter back to the child-woman? [...] For a long time he’ll have to study her as she looks in the mirror and to begin with, he’ll have to reject all the types of reasoning which men are so shabbily proud of, which they’re so miserably duped by, make a clean slate of the principles which man’s psychology has so egotistically been built on, which have absolutely no validity for woman, in order to advise women’s psychology in its trials with its predecessor, with the ultimate responsibility of reconciling them. I choose the child-woman not in order to oppose her to other women, but because it seems to me that in her and in her alone exists in a state of absolute transparency the other prism of vision which they obstinately refuse to take into account, because it obeys very different laws whose disclosure male despotism must try to prevent at all costs.¹⁵⁹

Breton stressed that “the time has come to value the ideas of woman at the expense of those of man, whose bankruptcy is coming to pass fairly tumultuously today.” He placed primary responsibility on artists to protest the masculine and “to maximize the importance of everything that stands out in the feminine world view in contrast to the masculine...” The (male) artist was to build “on woman’s resources,” and to “exalt” and adopt everything distinguishing her from man.¹⁶⁰

It was in Breton’s identification of the “feminine” aspect of life with actual women that he differed from more recent thinkers, not in his valuing of yin as necessary complement to yang.

The surrealist feminine was less biologically based than symbolic, in opposition to traditional,

159André Breton, Arcanum 17 with Apertures Grafted to the End, trans. Zack Rogow (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994), 65. Emphasis in original.

160Breton, Arcanum 17, 61.

masculine characteristics and ideals.¹⁶¹ Breton saw male and female as polarities which the male artist would synthesize.

Thus, over time, Bretonian surrealism gradually grew more gender-balanced. In 1984, former femme-enfant Meret Oppenheim stated that surrealist “male-centeredness” reflected inheritance of nineteenth-century attitudes and that the surrealists nonetheless accepted creative women without prejudice:

Concerning the theme of the ‘Muse’ I want to say: the ‘Muse’ is an allegorical representation of the spiritual female part in the creative male, the ‘genius.’ And the ‘genius’ represents the spiritual male part in the creative female, the

‘Muse.’¹⁶²

Romantic surrealist conceptions were not in close alignment with leftist ideals of gender equality, especially as promoted in the Communist and Czechoslovak Social Democrat press.

However, Nezval and Štyrský both gravitated toward a more romantic than Communist vision of women, one which for Nezval took on a livelier, more playful aspect (which prompted caricatures of the poet as eternal wooer), and which for Štyrský became an exploration of woman as a decadent image of death, decay, and loss. Toyen herself does not seem to have fit standard surrealist personifications of the muse such as the femme-enfant, Melusine, or Gradiva, but her inspirational role for other surrealists suggests that she represented a non-specific, non-theorized, non-gendered form of muse.

161Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968 (New York: Thames & Hudson Inc., 2005), 19.

162 Letter from Meret Oppenheim to Thames and Hudson, 1984, quoted in Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists, 12 (emphasis in original). Oppenheim’s view also draws on her study of Jung, a theorist not typically cited in mainstream surrealism.