Introduction

The terrains of artistic practice and of art history are structured in and struc-
turing of gendered power relations.1
Nearly 30 years after the publication of Griselda Pollock’s groundbreaking
feminist art-historical polemic Vision and Difference in 1988, there remains a
significant lack of close analysis of the roles played by women artists in the
histories and practices that characterise surrealism and modernism. A survey
of the flagship contemporary journal Modernism/Modernity reveals quickly
the scarcity of articles focusing specifically on identifying, exploring, and
theorising the intersections – the overlaps and touching points, interpenetra-
tions and connections – between the two historical, theoretical, and aesthetic
categories, an area of intellectual history which consequently exists as a con-
tested field.
The critically neglected presence of women artists working within this con-
tested field further complicates matters. Constantly ‘rediscovered’, re-installed,
or re-placed within each new generation’s reconceptualisations of modern-
ism and surrealism, the woman artist occupies a permanently impermanent
position, haunting the discourse at its margins, sometimes clear and visible,
sometimes shaded out, occluded by reaction and repression. The work of the
woman artist in modernism and surrealism comes (like that of the woman
Dadaist, as Amelia Jones has argued) to resist the ‘normalizing’ and com-
modifying narratives of art-historical recuperation.2 ‘Intersections’ suggests
both crossings and overlaps, and the concept of intersectionality or an accom-
modating awareness of the inseparability of oppressive systems in their impact
on socially constituted identities – ‘the distinct and frequently conflicting
dynamics that shaped the lived experience of subjects in these social locations’,
as Leslie McCall puts it.3

Surrealism/modernism
Forms of such ‘distinct and conflicting dynamics’ also circulate around
aesthetic-historical categories and periodisations like surrealism and

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 2 Intersections

modernism. Existing discussions demonstrate a variety of multifaceted and

often contradictory critical perspectives denying unification, generalisation,
or synthesis of such terms. Jacques Rancière, for example, regards surrealism
as incommensurable with modernism, and contests that ‘Surrealism and the
Frankfurt School were the principal vehicles for . . . countermodernity’;4 while
Natalya Lusty extends Walter Benjamin’s assertion that surrealism ‘functioned
as the radical other of modernism’,5 observing that ‘feminist readings of sur-
realism have endeavored to illustrate how the transgressive function of sur-
realism as the radical other of modernism has rested on its appropriation of
the disturbed female psyche and the violated female body as a metaphor for
its revolutionary aesthetic and political practice’.6
Susan Hiller identifies the relations between surrealism and modernism as
much more intimately linked – surrealism, she suggests, is the ‘shadow side
of modernism’,7 making the two inseparable from each other, interdependent
and yet different, one (modernism) material and solid, the other (surrealism)
a visible absence cast by that solid form, a dark shape imitating yet different
from its other. David Cunningham observes that ‘reconsidering the relation
of surrealism to modernism or the avant-garde should not involve simply
another re-jigging of curatorial categorisations derived (usually with consider-
able simplification) from the likes of Clement Greenberg or Peter Buerger, but
should invite us to reconsider the nature of the very concepts of modernism
and the avant-garde’.8 Cunningham locates one of these intersections between
surrealism and modernism in the process of reading (again with Benjamin)
surrealism ‘against the grain’.9 Where others prominently locate a Hegelian
synthesis at the core of surrealism (as is the case in Hal Foster’s assertion that
the ‘insistence on resolution, the Hegelian reconciliation of such dualisms as
waking and dreaming, life and death . . . is the raison d’etre of Bretonian sur-
realism’)10 Cunningham finds it in the ‘infinitely configured “plurality” of
fragmentation’,11 following Blanchot’s assertion that:

From the unknown – what is neither the pure unknowable nor the not yet
known – comes a relation that is indirect, a network of relations that never
allows itself to be expressed unitarily [. . .] a non-simultaneous set of forces, a
space of difference [. . .] [T]he future of surrealism is bound to this exigency of
a plurality escaping unification and extending beyond the whole (while at the
same time presupposing it, demanding its realization).12

It is this capacity of surrealism, its (dis)location in plurality, its presence as a

‘network of relations’ denying simple unification, which makes its interplays,
intersections, overlaps, and dissonances with modernism (in its own fragmen-
tary and contradictory nature) all the more fascinating and insistent.

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 Introduction 3

Women artists/surrealism/modernism

Since the 1970s, feminist art history has paid significant attention to women
artists practising in the field of surrealism, from early critical and historical
work by scholars of women’s surrealism including Gloria Orenstein, Whitney
Chadwick, Katharine Conley, and Mary Ann Caws, and the transformative
work on theorising modernism of October scholar Rosalind E. Krauss, to a
range of recent exhibitions and publication on individual artists, as well as
‘women surrealists’ more generally, such as Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists
and Surrealism (Manchester Art Gallery, 2009), Pallant House’s Surreal Friends
(2010), LACMA’s In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists
in Mexico and the United States (2012), and Tate Liverpool’s Leonora Car-
rington (2015).13
A cursory survey of large-scale surrealist exhibitions and publications
indicates, nevertheless, that these artists have still not secured guaranteed
places within the field mapped by general surveys of both surrealism and
modernism. Their under-representation in exhibitions such as Surrealism and
the Object (Pompidou, 2013), Another World: Dalí, Magritte, Miró and the
Surrealists (National Galleries of Scotland, 2010), Surrealism & Modernism:
From the Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (2003), and
in surveys of modernism such as Jean-Michel Rabaté’s A Handbook of Modern-
ism Studies (2013), suggests that the extensive work done on women artists has
failed to alter the preconceptions of male creative authority and male discur-
sive power that control and organise the institutions of art history, exhibition-
curation, and critical writing.
Recent feminist art history has offered more nuanced and extended explora-
tions of the interrelationship between modernism and surrealism, and of
women’s roles in both. Marsha Meskimmon has identified the central issue,
arguing that women ‘were an integral part of the social, economic and cultural
exchanges characterised as “modern”, yet all too frequently their contributions
to modernism as active participants in its debates and definitions have been
undervalued if not effaced’.14 In Annette Shandler Levitt’s The Genres and
Genders of Surrealism (1999) an expanded conception of surrealism is discussed
as an exploration of the inner and outer dynamics of modern ambiguity emerg-
ing after the First World War and centring on the notion of dépaysement (diso-
rientation) as an effect on the viewer of the surrealist artwork. Levitt expands
the field in part by focusing on women artists (like Leonor Fini and Dorothea
Tanning) who deliberately distanced themselves from Breton’s surrealist ‘inner
circle’, as well as on pre- or marginally surrealist male writers and artists.
Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-
Garde (2013) explores the subversive significance of play in women’s and men’s

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 4 Intersections

engagements with modernism, noting (for example) ‘the renewal of interest

in Surrealism, particularly in the work of women Surrealists, which gathered
momentum in the mid-1980s’.15 Suleiman’s preferred typology subsumes into
the single concept ‘avant-garde’, ‘however messy and full of dividing lines it
might be’, the broad categories of ‘modernism, post-modernism, and the his-
torical avant-gardes’,16 including surrealism – in part as a means of evading
October-style argument about categories and periodisations.
Such subsuming can be contrasted with the arguments of critics like
Meskimmon who prefer to eschew generalisations and inclusivities, rethink-
ing categorisation itself as an outcome of the backward glance through a
‘sanitised veil’ of history of academic discourses:
During the inter-war years in Europe and America there was no definitive
consensus concerning the ‘modern’ or ‘modernism’; many different factions
vied for the privilege to assert their ‘modernity’ and through this, their cultural
dominance. To read the 1920s and 1930s through the sanitised veil of post-
Second World War definitions of the modern and modernism is to reduce the
complex and multiple discourses and debates of the day into a falsely unified
whole.17
Feminist art historians might thus be divided between those who seek to parse
the complexities of modernist allegiances and identifications, and those pre-
pared to overlook these complexities for the sake of discursive and other
economies. Either way, the continual need to re-evaluate modernism and sur-
realism invites the examination and framing of interplays and interactions
within the tripartite nexus that organises the argument of this book: that of
‘women artists’, ‘surrealism’, and ‘modernism’. By analysing and exploring the
complex and shifting marginalisations and centrings, and visibilities and
invisibilities within canons, of hitherto neglected women artists, further
expansions of the surrealist and modernist fields can be effected.

Intersections
Intersections offers essays that develop from existing feminist scholarship on
women in surrealism and modernism, establishing new modes of reading and
criticism practised by a new generation of scholarship. The book frames dis-
cussions in an interdisciplinary variety of contexts of the three key terms
women/modernism/surrealism. Revisiting the substantial feminist body of
precursor work, the essays here explore questions of why specifically surreal-
ism has been such a focus of work on women in modernism, and how and
why within this focus certain artists have been neglected, while others (e.g.
Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, or Lee Miller) have recently become ‘canoni-
cal’ figures within both feminist and wider canon formations. Scrutinising

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 Introduction 5

women artists’ works with, and within, surrealism and in the context of mod-
ernism dynamises current scholarly understanding of all three terms, opening
new and fruitful ways of encountering, and more boldly of undoing, histories
and concepts that have defined all three. The essays in this critical anthology
thus focus on the collisions, collusions, dialogues, and intersections between
women artists, modernism and surrealism. They open up and stimulate dis-
cussion on persistent critical blindspots relating to the broad identity-
categories of race, class, nationality, and location, questioning the processes
by which certain artists (or artistic oeuvres) have been neglected, while others
have become canonical figures.
The essays here challenge persistent canonical constructions in a number
of ways. They explore the triple-structure ‘women artists/surrealism/modern-
ism’ by focusing on little-known oeuvres, or on work produced at later periods
in artists’ lives or in media deemed unusual in relation to their ‘typical’ oeuvre,
or on work by artists who have hitherto been regarded as marginal or irrele-
vant to debates around modernism, surrealism, and the woman artist. The
essays offer theoretical explorations of different generations of artists who fit
in a variety of ways into the wider category of modernism and who intersect
with surrealist practices and traditions in complex and sometimes problematic
ways. These range from figures whose works precede and shape surrealism
but have in fundamental ways been excluded from (and by) it, to those who
actively contributed to some of the many manifestations of historical surreal-
ism, to contemporary artists working in the historically expanded field of
post-surrealist traditions. This volume offers case studies discussing manifes-
tations of modernism and surrealism in specific national contexts including
Czech, Swiss, North-American, Austrian, French, English, and Caribbean,
and exploring some of the intersections between colonial and patriarchal
repressions. The volume pays particular attention to artistic practice as a poly-
mathic engagement in, and with, a multitude of media, ranging from writing
and film making, to costume design and fashion.
As Rosalind Krauss asserts, historicism ‘works on the new and different to
diminish newness and mitigate difference. It makes a place for change in our
experience by evoking the model of evolution, so that the man who now is
can be accepted as being different from the child he once was, by simultane-
ously being seen – through the unseeable action of the telos – as the same.’18
The essays in this collection seek to evade such historicist flattening of newness
and difference: they are not arranged chronologically, but brought together in
loosely thematic categories, inviting resonances within the groupings, as well
as outside of them with other essays. The categories encompass broadly dif-
ferentiated practices – automatic, poetic, magical, combinatory, and the prac-
tice of fashion. These differentiated sections, mapping works in a variety of
different media, themselves pro- and analeptically intersect with each other,

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 6 Intersections

producing echoes, shared artistic and authorial concerns, as well as differentia-

tions, and historical, national, generic, and other specificities. A key intersec-
tion of increasing significance in modernist and surrealist studies concerns
social class. Most of the artists addressed here (like most of their male coun-
terparts) share a similar upper-middle class or aristocratic background bestow-
ing on them certain privileges of wealth and social position, a situation that
does not invalidate the political content or radicalism of their work, but does
necessitate being aware of the conditions of its production.
A significant and recurrent concern of authors in this volume is to explore
what Susan Hiller has called ‘the repressed history of automatism within
modernism’.19 Colin Rhodes examines the automatic practices of four artists,
Hélène Smith (Catherine Elise Muller; 1861–1929), Aloïse Corbaz (1886–1964),
Unica Zürn (1916–70), and Anna Zemánková (1908–86), tracing the interplays
between (male) surrealists’ ‘partial appropriation or colonisation’ of such prac-
tices and artists, and the simultaneous relegation of these artists to ‘perform
as footnotes’ and ‘marginalia’. In the process Rhodes reveals surrealism’s disap-
pointingly bourgeois and conventional attitude towards outsider artists.
Katharine Conley’s essay on Susan Hiller (born 1940) focuses on her
weaving together of the ‘legacies of modernism and surrealism with spiritual-
ism’ and explores her embracing, in opposition to the claims of the original
group of male surrealists, automatism’s ‘origins in spiritualism’. Conley’s explo-
ration relates Hiller’s work to that of Leonora Carrington (1917–2011), with her
emphasis on the spiritual origins of automatism, tying surrealism to a ‘tradi-
tion that prominently featured women artists’ (thus developing a thread intro-
duced in Rhodes’s essay).
Guy Reynolds’s piece extends Conley’s focus on Hiller to other women
artists working with the automatist surrealist legacy, namely Louise Bour-
geois (1911–2010) and Helen Chadwick (1953–96). Reynolds explores the dif-
ferent and differentiated ways in which these artists negotiate and work the
hybrid space where ‘the verbal and the visual meet and enter into dialogue’.
He traces these three artists’ distinct and continuing feminist dialogues with
the ‘legacy of modernism, with Freud’s legacy, and how we can write about
cultural bequests’.
Following Reynolds’ exploration of the ‘intersections of image and word’
in these automatic practices, the next section focuses on little-known poetic
practices (both writerly and visual) of artists conventionally regarded as
working in visual media. Jonathan Eburne’s essay examines the 1937 collabora-
tion Le Coeur de Pic (Heart of Spaces), by Claude Cahun (1894–1954) and Lise
Deharme (1898–1980). Framed as a children’s nursery-book, this work of
illustrated verse contrasts sharply (Eburne argues) with Cahun’s more explicit
political writings of the same period. He explores the ‘political significance of
understanding poetic language as a medium that negates, misdirects, and

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 Introduction 7

disrupts the very relations of communicability or action it purports to enable’,

and focuses on Cahun’s ‘surrealist insistence’ on ‘mediated political expression’,
which sees poetic language as a resistance, rather than expression of ‘cognitive
certainty presumed by propaganda and protest writing alike’.
Catriona MacAra’s essay explores the intimate relations and dialogues
between Dorothea Tanning’s (1910–2012) soft sculpture practice, and particu-
larly the piece Emma (1970), and Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 realist novel Madame
Bovary. McAra argues that for too long gendered readings of modernist and/
or surrealist practices have been marginalised by biographical readings.
Instead, she suggests, drawing on the methodological focus of Mieke Bal, that
Tanning embodies Flaubert’s contradictory character as a form of écriture
féminine and ‘autotopographical’ critique. For McAra, Emma functions as a
‘disruptive object within the modernist project, morphologically and themati-
cally closer . . . to more playful neo-avant-garde, post-minimalist practices and
feminist aesthetics’.20
Victoria Ferentinou’s discussion focuses on Leonora Carrington’s little-
explored novel The Stone Door, written in the 1940s and published in 1978.
According to Ferentinou, in this novel Carrington questions ‘fixed meanings,
linear movements and dualist categories’ through her modernist exploration
of liminality. This exploration, however, is not a simple re-adaptation of mod-
ernist tropes, but a reworking through ‘the lens of surrealist ideas, such as the
marvellous’, providing a far more ‘transgressive framework’.
Hazel Donkin’s essay examines how the works of female surrealists
impacted in the period after the Second World War on surrealist discourses
on and theorisations of sexuality, gender, and the family, focusing mainly on
the contributions of Nora Mitrani (1921–61) and Joyce Mansour (1928–86).
Their engagement with these themes ‘in a climate of modernisation and
increasing sexual freedoms’ is analysed through their image and text contribu-
tions to the key post-war journals Médium: Communication Surréaliste (4
issues, 1953–55), le surréalisme, meme (12 issues, 1956–59), BIEF (5 issues,
1958–60), and La Brèche (8 issues, 1961–65).
Part III explores the functions of the magical practices and discourses
engaged in by women artists, viewing them in and as points of intersections
between surrealism and modernism. Neil Matheson’s essay on Ithell
Colquhoun (1906–88) and her practices, grounded in occultism and magic,
views them as intimately bound to the spiritualism connected to automatism
(previously discussed in Conley’s piece): ‘If we accept the occult as an inte-
gral aspect of the modern’, writes Matheson, ‘contributing as it does to the
emergence of new forms of subjectivity, then Colquhoun’s occultism falls
more squarely within advanced modernism, anticipating key themes within
postwar surrealism’.21 Matheson notes the irony that despite this anticipatory
value of Colquhoun’s work, and its close relations to surrealism’s own interest

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 8 Intersections

in magic, she was excluded from the British surrealist group. It is interesting
to observe that (similar to Rhodes’s conclusion about the partial inclusion
into surrealism of the artists he discusses), it is Colquhoun’s actual participa-
tory practice in occultism and her membership of ‘secret societies’, rather
than any purely symbolic expression of these practices, that was a key reason
for her exclusion.
Terri Geis’s essay continues the enquiry into ideological double-moves (in
the main, by both the original surrealists and by their subsequent representa-
tions in different art histories). Geis explores connections between the ways
modernist discourses tend to appropriate artists for specific purposes, and
simultaneously exclude the possibility of their being significant shapers of
these discourses. She examines some instances of the ‘complex level of
exchanges’ at work within artistic encounters in the Caribbean, tracing some
of the complexities of modernist primitivism as well as the ‘tensions surround-
ing colonial identity and assimilation’. As Geis asserts (following Edward Said,
who asserted in Culture and Imperialism [1993] that ‘most histories of Euro-
pean aesthetic modernism leave out the massive infusions of non-European
cultures to the metropolitan heartland during the early years of this century’),
a number of studies of surrealism have examined the importance and, indeed,
centrality of non-Western cultures and thought to the movement (often
linking it, more or less problematically to anti-colonial protest). According to
Geis, the role of women artists in relation to this area of surrealism has not
yet been thoroughly investigated. She examines two moments of alliance in
the Caribbean in the 1940s: first. the conversation through essays between
André Breton (Martinique: Snake Charmer [1948]) and the Martinican writer
Suzanne Césaire (1915–66) (‘The great camouflage’ [1945]); and second, the
relationship between Maya Deren (1917–61) and the Haitian painter and
voudou priest André Pierre (1914–2005).
Part IV examines a diverse range of combinatory practices as sites of both
intersection and discord between surrealism and modernism in women artists’
works. Ilene Susan Fort discusses the stylistic combinations of surrealism and
classicism in the work of the American artist, Helen Lundeberg (1908–99).
Fort locates these stylistic combinations in the intersections between the
appropriations of classicism in modern North American history and ideology,
and surrealism’s own classicist appropriations in works by artists such as
Giorgio de Chirico. In Lundeberg’s work these intersections ‘utilised ancient
history and myth to explore and challenge contemporary cultural assumptions
about gender and power’.
Reflecting on and extending earlier discussions in Part II of this anthology,
the essays by Patricia Allmer, Elza Adamowicz, and Gabriele Schor focus on
collagistic practices in poetic contexts. Allmer scrutinises Lee Miller’s (1907–
77) documentation of textual surfaces, specifically in her photographs of

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 Introduction 9

advertising surfaces in Germany in 1945, in the immediate aftermath of the

War. Allmer argues that Miller’s textual landscapes engage dialogically with
Dada collage techniques and strategies, and through this engagement intersect
with Nazi ideologies of art and the aesthetic, deconstructing the ideologies of
Nazi propaganda with the very modernist art forms they tried to repress and
destroy.
Elza Adamowicz’s essay focuses on examinations of the collagistic practice
of the French artist Aube Elléouët (born 1935) from the 1990s to 2012, and the
negotiations through this practice of the female figure (dis)located within the
intersections of modernism and surrealism, intersections closely bound to
Elléouët’s personal identity and history, as the daughter of Jacqueline Lamba
and Breton. Adamowicz explores this body of work as being in complex dia-
logue (‘complicitous, ironic, antagonistic?’) with ‘the theory and practice of
collage of the first generation of surrealists’, examining relations ‘between a
citational practice which looks back and a poetic practice which creates as yet
never-seen dream landscapes, fantastic narratives, and imaginary creatures’.
Adamowicz’s enquiry concludes with a consideration of Elléouët’s collage
practice as post-surrealist, or postmodernist.
Gabriele Schor’s essay analyses the ‘feminist sensual poetics’ deployed in
the work of the Austrian artist Birgit Jürgenssen (1949–2003), a corpus which
emerges out of, and is closely bound to, specific iconographies of surrealism,
particularly that surrealism engaged with by first generation women artists.
Schor focuses her discussion on the ‘interplay of textual, poetic and icono-
graphic elements’, discussing Jürgenssen’s practice in a specifically Austrian
national context.
The final part of Intersections focuses on the practice of fashion. Rachel
Grew’s essay explores the difficulty of containing Leonor Fini’s (1907–96) work
in both surrealist and modernist discourses, suggesting (in a formula that
might characterise the whole book) that ‘intervention is needed in these
various discourses; one which emphasises ambiguity, overlap, and multiplic-
ity’. According to Grew, Fini works at ‘the vanguard of an embodied discourse
that enshrines the constructed artifice rather than the authentic “truth”, which
has become an obstacle to art historical critique’. She traces ‘processes of
embodiment’ in Fini’s work by focuses on two instances (from a wide oeuvre)
of her theatrical designs: the group of costumes she designed for the 1949
ballet Le Rêve de Leonor (for which she was also the creator of the story and
the set-designer), and the floral motifs connected with Fini’s designs for the
1969 production of Oscar Panizza’s Le Concile d’Amour (The Love Council).
The volume concludes with Emma West’s essay, which points to the recur-
rent art-historical and curatorial reduction of artists (both male and female)
to a select number of works which seem to return eternally as definitive
oeuvres. West focuses instead on lesser-known works by Elsa Schiaparelli

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 10 Intersections

(1890–1973), which she explores as ‘cultural translations of surrealism’ in the

context of ‘the modern split between an elite, aesthetic high modernism on
the one hand and popular, commercial mass culture on the other’. Schia-
parelli’s work, West suggests, transports surrealism into a new dimension, and
she argues that these designs ‘allow the performance of surrealism on a scale
unconceivable for its founders, revolutionising not just traditional fashion and
ideas of femininity but also surrealism itself ’.
Intersections between surrealism, modernism, and women artists are thus
explored across a variety of oeuvres each critically neglected to a greater or
lesser extent; each bearing a specific set of relations to, and distinctions from,
the key practices, features, tropes, and ideological positions characteristic of
various formations of surrealism; and each marking a specific set of intersec-
tions between surrealist and modernist aesthetic assumptions. One purpose
of this book is to externalise and make explicit the ‘internal dialogue’22 that
critics like Suleiman have noted taking place between women surrealists
and their male counterparts. While (as critics and anthologists like Penelope
Rosemont have been at pains to emphasise) ‘the Surrealist Movement has
always opposed overt as well as de facto segregation along racial, ethnic,
or gender lines’,23 such segregation returns in selective and repressive art-
historical accounts. The essays in Intersections counter this segregational
tendency by exploring how those lines of separation and distinction might
blur, might touch, overlap, or entwine specifically surrealist contexts with
those of modernist aesthetic practice, of what Ithell Colquhoun (citing Breton)
called (in ‘The mantic stain: Surrealism and automatism’ [1949]) ‘the modern
procedure’.24

Notes
1 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity, and the Histories
of Art (London: Routledge Classics, 2003), 76. Originally published 1988.
2 Amelia Jones, ‘“Women” in dada: Elsa, Rrose, and Charlie’, in Naomi Sawelson-
Gorse, Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (Cambridge, MA
and London: MIT Press, 1998), 162.
3 Leslie McCall, ‘The complexity of intersectionality’, Signs, 30:3 (Spring 2005),
1780.
4 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, ed.
and trans. G. Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 22.
5 Natalya Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Ashgate, 2007),
10.
6 Lusty, Surrealism, 10.
7 Susan Hiller and Roger Malbert, ‘Susan Hiller in conversation with Robert
Malbert’, Papers of Surrealism, 5 (Spring 2007), www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/
papersofsurrealism/journal5/acrobat%20files/interviews/hillerpdf.pdf.

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 Introduction 11

8 David Cunningham, ‘The futures of surrealism: Hegelianism, romanticism,

and the avant-garde’, SubStance, 34:2 (2005), 49.
9 Cunningham, ‘The futures of surrealism’, 58.
10 Cunningham, ‘The futures of surrealism’, 52.
11 Cunningham, ‘The futures of surrealism’, 58.
12 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Howard (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 409; cited by Cunningham, ‘The futures
of surrealism’, 58.
13 Key works in this tradition include Orenstein’s ‘Art history and the case for the
women of surrealism’, first published in The Journal of General Education, 27:1
(1975), 31–54; Whitney Chadwick’s Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1985); Katharine Conley’s Automatic Woman:
The Representation of Woman in Surrealism (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 2004); Mary Ann Caws, Rudolph Kuenzli, and Gwen Raab-
erg’s (eds), Surrealism and Women: Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press,
1991); and Krauss and Jane Livingstone’s (eds), L’Amour fou: Photography and
Surrealism (New York and Washington DC: Abbeville Press-The Corcoran
Gallery of Art, 1985). Additional important works include Xavière Gauthier’s
Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), and the special issue entitled
La Femme Surréaliste of the French feminist journal Obliques, 14–15 (Paris,
Winter 1977–78) (which included a translation of Orenstein’s essay). The essays
in Intersections develop from and expand the theoretical and referential range
of the work of these texts, introducing (for example) new international per-
spectives to a principally American and French critical tradition.
14 Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits
of German Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 3.
15 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 145.
16 Suleiman, Subversive Intent, 12.
17 Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough, 2.
18 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’, October, 8 (Spring 1979), 30.
19 Hiller, ‘Susan Hiller in conversation with Roger Malbert’.
20 Catriona McAra, ‘Emma’s navel: Dorothea Tanning’s narrative sculpture’, this
volume.
21 Neil Matheson, ‘Desert islands: magic and modernity in the work of Ithell
Colquhoun’, this volume.
22 Suleiman, Subversive Intent, 29.
23 Penelope Rosemont (ed.), Surrealist Women: An International Anthology
(London: The Athlone Press, 2000), xxx.
24 Ithell Colquhoun, ‘The mantic stain: Surrealism and automatism’, in Rose-
mont, Surrealist Women, 223.

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