Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Louise Bourgeois

Frida Kahlo was just one of them: between 1930 and the 1960s many more women artists contributed to the Surrealist movement than has hitherto been assumed. The male Surrealists surrounding André Breton mostly saw them only as partners or models, but this volume shows how much more these women artists had to offer. The dominant topic of male Surrealists was woman as goddess, she-devil, doll, fetish, child-woman, android, and dream creature. The women artists of Surrealism, on the other hand, were searching for a new female identity and incidentally discovered their own language of forms. And then there was the examination of political topics, literature and foreign myths. Painting, drawing, objects, photography and films complement each other to create an overall picture of the surreal and fanciful creative work of the women artists of the avant-garde from all over the world.