In Wonderland:The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States- LACMA

I saw this exhibit a while ago...I think maybe in March? I had hoped to get to go back and see it again before it left town and take a pile of photos of all the most engrossing pieces, but as usual, the chaos of real life intervened, so I'll keep it short.

The show was wonderful. It was chock full of art, so much of it fabulous and beautiful and disturbing. There were some Frida Kahlo pieces of course, as she is the grande dame of the surrealist movement. But also many many other artists. I can't remember nearly enough names (again shame on me for not going back 30 times and really pinning it all down) but one woman in particular who was heavily featured was Helen Lundeberg, and I was very taken with her pieces, which were masterly in execution, precise, controlled, and surreal- similar to how Magritte painted- spare with that sort of stoic approach.  


Sidebar: Precision in painting is extremely challenging. I recently took some painting classes and ended up frustrated all over again at the intractable nature of paint. It's just such a jerk. You try and push a semi-liquid around evenly with a brush, and get the colors to apply smoothly and the edges to be straight and then to blend the shadows on top of that, or add a tiny detail...and worst still, say you make a background and it's a lovely shade, but then you mess up your main figure- now you have to go back and put in more background and try and match up the color or if you cant, maybe repaint the whole thing, at which point you are bound to mess up some other part, and whole time the thing is drying up and you apply too much suddenly you wiped away too much paint and...round and round. And then your hands are a crazy mess and stuck to the brush, and there's paint everywhere. 

Painting to me is like every movie ever made where someone tries to murder someone and the plan seems solid but then one by one  all the little details spiral out of control and the criminal gets more and more desperate, and eventually it all ends in a desperate shootout. Not so much with watercolors, but otherwise, definitely, this is how painting is. Impressionism and expressionism and abstraction must have been such a relief for painters because after all that hard work to make smooth canvases with sharp sharp edges and perfectly graduated shading, it just must have been so much faster and freer. 

So I'm in deep awe of people who seem to be able to control their painting, and even more so of people who paint with precision in modern times, because no one would hold it against them if they went abstract encaustic collage instead. End Sidebar.
 
Ok, on to more political avenues now. The other reason the show was so deeply moving is that it was a successful show of all women artists, many of them working in the first half of the nineteenth century as unrecognized, un-canonized contemporaries of the male artists who were famous for the style. You can go look up the Guerilla Girls for a full numerical analysis of how underrepresented women artists are in gallery shows and art, if you want the cold hard facts, but the point is this. Men and women make art, but men get more famous, more consistently for it. And a lot of times the traveling exhibitions of historical art just leave out the ladies. If they do a show of impressionists you better bet that Mary Cassat and Berthe Morisot will be cut before a Degas, Renoir or Monet. And that decision continues to affect the relative fame of those artists, over and over and over again, until people don't know who the women contemporaries in a movement are. Even if it's thanks to the influence of Mary Cassat that US museums and collectors bought so much impressionist work early on. Sometimes there are no women in a historical movement because no women could take part. But often there are no women in a historical movement because no women were observed to have taken part. 

Seeing this show felt to me like a little taste of what it might be like someday to see equal amounts of male and female art. The women artists surrealist artist drew from different imagery than  male artists tend to draw from- overall I'd say there was this different tone or flavor to the exhibition, and it was worth tasting as a counterpoint to men only shows. But I think perhaps someday, the best show of them all would really mix the two together. A Lundeberg side by side with a Magritte, earning the same amount of wall space. 


 

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