First ladies of Surrealism
Is bowled over by the inspired pairing of the work of and
It was always the women who were the more measured members of the Surrealist set. Less theatrical: no twirling moustaches, for example. Previously overlooked, they are now enjoying something of a moment. Leonora Carrington and Claude Cahun have been the subjects of recent biographies. And Dorothea Tanning, the doyenne of domestic Gothic, gets a Tate retrospective next spring. But first we have an inspired pairing of shows at The Hepworth Wakefield on Lee Miller and Viviane Sassen, two photographers with Surrealist leanings. Their work may be separated by three quarters of a century, but it is united by a desire to unsettle and spook.
Since her death in 1977, Miller the muse has rather overshadowed Miller the photographer. A great beauty in her youth, she was the lover of the French Dadaist Man Ray and, later, wife of the English painter Roland Penrose. But she had a talent to match her no-more-significant others. Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain, despite its title, places her on a par with her international contemporaries as well as within the under-appreciated British Surrealist movement. But it also puts her at an odd remove: for while others took barnstorming flights of fancy, Miller found the surreal in the real.
An impressive gathering of oils and sculptures, including major works by Joan Miró, Giorgio de Chirico, Eileen Agar, Paul Nash, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí, illustrate what the others were up to. Which was largely crazy paving objects into incongruous settings (and then coming up with impregnable titles).
Miller not only documented the movement, often at the Miller/ Penrose home at Farley Farm in Sussex, in a rather preposterous manner – Max Ernst peaking through a hedge, Henry Moore hugging one of his Mother and Child sculptures – but also took Surrealism into the commercial realm with her fashion and reportage work during the Forties.
There is a rich vein of absurdity running through her commissions. Her pictures of London’s defences and the Allied push through France and Germany during 1944-45 play out like a ghastly farce. Women in fire masks appear as home-front ghouls; a single pot-plant marks the spot of an unexploded bomb; a man in camouflage poses like a matinee idol. And perhaps her most famous photograph, Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub, is arguably the zenith of Surrealism.
After Miller’s monochromes, viewing Hot Mirror, a survey of 10 years’ work by Viviane Sassen, the contemporary Dutch photographer, is a dazzling experience. Sassen’s photographs hum with colour: blood reds, lemon yellows and ultramarine blues provide vigorous backgrounds to the human form. Raised in Kenya, she has a love of the flashbulb African light. But things are not as sunny as they seem. Sassen is a master of the partial portrait – a knee here, a hand there, a torso cropped off. She objectifies the body – not sexually, but abstractly – and casts her limbs on planes of bright colour. Her figures don’t arouse, they confuse.
One imagines that Miller would have loved Sassen’s playfulness, having taken a series of sculptural nudes herself in the Thirties. Other
‘Their work may be separated by three quarters of a century, but it is united by a desire to unsettle and spook’
correlations to the earlier photographer’s work spring out – Inhale, Sassen’s shot of a woman’s face with leaves placed over the eyes and mouth, echo Miller’s wartime shots of gas masks. And there is a morbidity to both photographers’ work borne out of personal experience: each endured a traumatic illness when they were young.
Like Miller, Sassen made her name shooting frocks and tops for the style magazines. And her pictures are of an equally unusual fashion, harking back to the golden age of mid-century fashion photography, the era of Horst P Horst, Louise Dahl-Wolfe and, of course, Miller. For Sassen, the composition is the thing. Geometry trumps product placement.
At the centre of the Sassen show is Totem, an immersive film installation in which viewers stand in a mirrored cube, as landscapes emerge in duplicate from the corners and spread over the walls like a giant moving Rorschach test. Sand dunes and seascapes repeat and retreat. It is a disorientating visual experience; I left mesmerised and wobbly.
This pair of exhibitions is a triumph of peculiar projections but also a kind of skewed verisimilitude, an odd honesty. It provides a convincing argument that the future of Surrealism lies not in bowler hats and lobsters, but in a woman’s perspective.