The Enigma Of Woman
Sex? The drive has always been there. Sex and Love, love and sex, love and women. How else to explain the survival of the species? Sex cloaked in the mantle of courtly dance, minstrel ballad, romantic chivalry, religious fervor; or pilloried in disgust born of fear or dissapointment. Throughout history peoples from all cultures have attained the intense arousal of emotional feelings towards sexual attraction. The facination with women and love has persisted throughout history, but the Surrealist artists and writers� preoccupation with these themes was truly remarkable and extraordinary. They were influenced by the period in which they flourished - between the dreadful First World War through the liberalism of the roaring twenties, ebbing from the penury of the thirties. The artistic creators were subject to the era�s limitations - especially in conveying their prevailing ideas and beliefs, and techniques to the beholder. They were also individuals with special talents, who in most cases have devoted a significant part of their lives in shaping their attained skills and in the bringing forth their ideas. The aura of �Love and Women� was a world of exotic phantasms for the Surrealist poets and artists; a hallucinatory and dream-like intensity filled with a potent and unconcious sexual imagery. The Surrealists�s dreams were valuable simply for their poetic content, whose hidden sexual symbolism filled them and their patrons with delight." It is not far - through the images - from the man to his visions, through the nature of real things to the nature of imagined things. Their value is equal. Matter, movement, need, desire, is inseparable. ." (Paul Eluard, Beyond Painting) The years 1916-1918 were crucial for the formation of the Surrealists. Aspiring to a revolution of the human mind, the Surrealists began by rejecting traditional aesthetic as well as moral values, which they considered bourgeois, believing that releasing the unconscious would lead them to a higher reality - a "surreality." The spirit of the surrealistic artists, poets and writers affirmed the rights of the dream, of love, of awareness, and they joined in encouraging to be open to wild encounters and to the surprises afforded by chance. (1) French writers and poets, such as Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Rene Crevel, and others sought to create innovative poetic images by means of automatic writing. That is, free stream-of-consciousness creative process. In the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, Breton put forth the following definition, "It is a marvelous faculty of attaining two widely separate realities without departing from the realm of our experience; of bringing them together and drawing a spark from their contact; of gathering within our reach of our senses abstract figures endowed with same intensity..." The Surrealist artists adopted these ideas. They�re visual counter-part to the poet�s verbal free association was doodle-like automatism, expressed mainly by a biomorphic images of Miro and Masson. Somewhat later, the Freudian interest in dreams, suggested a different type of poetic iconography, evolved by Dali, Tanguy, and Magritte, amoung others, who explored the content and symbolism of dreams (2) in a quest to link the inner and outer worlds. To quote Andre Breton again, the aim was to arrive at the "resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly, so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak." One of the major preoccupations of the Surrealists was the facination with the phenomenon of love, and the love of a woman. "What I love includes what I love to recognize and what I love not to recognize. I believe that surrealism has raised the art of love of woman to the conception of the most fervent relationships," Breton wrote in 1934. The spirit of Surrealism encompassed the love of all that was considered natural - epitomized by the love of a woman - and the hatred of any restriction of man�s free spirit. The facination with Woman and Love has peristed throughout history. Woman is depicted as the Great Mother, the Queen of heaven. She can be protective or destructive. Various cultures treated the symbol of woman as protective, nourishing, the spiritual guide and virginal. At times woman was seen as the seducer, the harpy and harlot. The Woman in antiquity was pictured in mythological images and themes to symbolize both virtues and vices and the changes in the seasons. In the ancient temples, coupling with the chosen passionate attendants of the love godesses gave spiritual ecstasy to the fervent believer. The Ancient Greeks worshipped Aphrodite, the goddess of love, generation, beauty and fertility: The cult of Aphrodite was widespread throughout the land where young, virile maidens, covered in the beauty of their skin, danced in the many temples dedicated to the love for the goddess. They spread their fruitful thighs, giving the purity of their virginity as a symbolic offering of love. They rejoiced in the dance of spiritual virginal renewal of their bodies that continued as a love offering to the queen of heavens - till the Oracle signed. The Romans, both men and women, congregated in the bath houses and banquet halls dedicated to Cupid, the god of love, son of Venus, the love goddess: Eroticism was pictured on the very walls of these establishments. Roman men and women expressed their love and desires in bacchanal orgies of unhibited sex, enacted at the highest level of the ancient world. The Surrealists artists adopted these ideas as a continuation of the practices of the ancient past. The Surrealist artists equated love with both freedom and enlightenment. They argued passionately for love, poetry, and humour and against logic, rationality and objectivity. The artists reasoned that the royal way to knowledge is love, "since love allows us to identify ourselves with the loved one and thus to recognize ourselves in him/ her." Surrealist depictions of woman assumed seemingly endless configurations. She sometimes appears as an omnipotent earth-mother figure, as seen in several works by Andre Masson; elsewhere, nature itself takes on the anthropomorphic shape of a woman. At the same time, many artists were obsessed with mystique of eroticism, creating stimulating and attractive portrayals of desire. The works of surrealist art are a hymn to woman, a strange hybrid of visions and reality, of convulsive beauty and chaste temptations. Surrealists exalted women and her role in the amorous relationships. Many surrealist paintings picture the presence of woman by the aura of fetish symbols that creates images of desire to the beholder. At times she is presented from a contrastive humourous angles. The woman is also rendered a mysterious apparition, intertwined with various objects and sometimes distorted nearly beyond recognition, or reduced to a mere few lines, female signs or fetish symbols such as breast, a shoe or lingerie. Artists were enthusiastic in the use of photographs in the portrayal of �Woman and Love�. The American artist Man Ray was a leader in this field. He had moved to Paris in 1921, and worked on photography, doing portraits, nudes, unexpected images. Man Ray wanted to photograph ideas rather than things, and dreams rather than ideas. He portrayed the figure female figure with personal details, which gave the flesh a dream-like aureole. � "The desire to love and be loved," indeed inspired numerous variations, ranging from the delicacy of first love, as in a book cover by the Italian writer Enrico Baj, to the works of the surrealist artists - the phantasms of Salvador Dali, the resentment and anxiety of a betrayed lover portrayed by the Alberto Giacometti, the near-realism of Rene Margritte, to the mixed multiplicity of forms by Max Ernst and Joan Miro. Yet as Andre Breton noted, "each woman is the sum of desires and dreams, a sum that has never been before and never will be again." The Surrealists� infatuation with woman continues "out of time" in the works of succeeding generations of artists, conveying similar desires and dreams. NOTES: 1. Society encourages, through the media, acceptance of various forms of sexual expression, be it written or visual, that entertains and delights the audience in which they are presented. 2. Sexual fantasy or daydreaming is a commonly used outlet for sexual feelings, which can be pleasurable, even humourous, and quite satisfying. Under the spell of fantasy, the person becomes sexually aroused, but, usually, has no intention of acting out the fantasy. The expression of fantasy can be found in literature, the arts, and in various form of theater. 3. All arts, be it in the written form or in the portrayed images, are influenced by the times in which they flourish. They are subject to an era�s limitations or abundance. � � BIBLIOGRAPHY Catalogue and exhibition, �Enigma of Woman� - curator Ruth Apter-Gabriel - Israel Museum/Jerusalem. Encyclopedia of World Mythology - fowarded by Rex Warner, Octopus Books Ltd., London Surrealist Art, Sarane Alexandrian - World of Art books, Thames and Hudson Publishers, London and New York. Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols, J.C. Cooper - Thames and Hudson, London. � � � SIDEBAR - Surrealism Surrealism - a movement in art and literature, begun in France around 1919, that sought to resolve the contradic-tory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality by various techniques, thus escaping the dominance of reason and conscious control. Surrealism was simply a revolution in literature, poetry and art. Its aim was nothing less than the liberation in the arts and in life, of the resources of the subconcious mind. The development of the spirit of surrealism began after the Dada* antiart-revolt of 1916-1919 and ended as an organized movement with the death of its guiding spirit, the writer and poet, Andre Breton, in 1966. For one to understand the thought of the surrrealist writers, poets and artists, one must be aware that art to them was not an end to itself; but it was a method of creating an awareness of all that is most secret, most precious and most surprising in life. The surrealists wanted to be neither craftsmen nor aesthetes; all they wanted was to be the �inspired ones� and the venturers. DADA/DADAISM - A short lived movement (1916-1920) in literature and art which sought to abandon all forms and throw off all traditions.
Copyright © 2002 Norman A Rubin |