Surrealism, dreams and feminine imaginations

Top 50 women surrealist painters

From Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, Frida Kahlo and Toyen to Leonor Fini, Meret Oppenheim, Kay Sage, Eileen Agar and Paula Rego, here are fifty artists who have given modern dreams a singular power.

Surrealism is not just the story of Breton, Dalí or Magritte. In its margins, its exiles, its workshops and its international circles, women have invented worlds where the unconscious, the body, myths, magic, humor and metamorphosis become major pictorial languages.

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Leonora Carrington, grande femme peintre surréaliste

Before the grid

Why women changed the face of surrealism

Long presented as muses, companions or models, the women of surrealism nevertheless produced some of the strongest images of the movement. They do not just illustrate the dream: they move it towards autobiography, alchemy, storytelling, sexuality, magic, cooking, masks, theater, war, exile and identity.

This classification brings together historical surrealists, artists close to Dada and photomontage, painters of magical realism and several heiresses whose work maintains a deep relationship with the unconscious, metamorphosis or inner vision. The objective is to offer a clear, useful and lively visual journey, without reducing these artists to a single label.

Top 1 to 10

The great figures of the surrealist dream

Carrington, Varo, Tanning, Kahlo, Toyen, Fini, Oppenheim, Sage, Agar and Colquhoun give surrealism its freest worlds: myths, metamorphoses, occultism, mental architecture and black humor.

Ranks 11 to 20

Graphics, Belgium, Spain and Mexico

Valentine Hugo, Jacqueline Lamba, Unica Zürn, Abercrombie, Baes, Van Damme, Izquierdo, Mallo, Blanchard and Rolanda show a more intimate, theatrical, popular or poetic surrealism.

Ranks 21 to 30

Post-war image, automatism and modernities

Nahui Olin, Grete Stern, Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Luchita Hurtado, Judith Reigl, Else Alfelt, Martha Boto, Margarita Azurdia and Paula Rego extend dreams towards identity, photography, the body, abstraction and narrative.

Ranks 31 to 40

Dada, abstraction, cosmologies and heirs

Kiki Smith, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hannah Höch, Georgia O'Keeffe, Tarsila do Amaral, Tamara de Lempicka, Hilma af Klint, Yayoi Kusama, Marlene Dumas and Cecily Brown broaden the surrealist imagination towards myth, collage, vision and the psyche.

Ranks 41 to 50

Avant-gardes, gestures and psychological visions

Sonia Delaunay, Lee Krasner, Natalia Goncharova, Aleksandra Ekster, Lyubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel and Franciska Clausen recall that the modern dream also circulates through color, scene, gesture and portrait.

Method

How the 50 artists were selected

The selection first favors artists directly linked to historical surrealism: participation in groups, exhibitions, magazines, exile networks, automatism, dream painting, photomontage or poetic objects. She then adds painters close to magical realism, Dada, visionary abstraction or contemporary legacies of dreams.

The classification balances historical importance, pictorial force, singularity of the imagination and readability for the reader. Some artists are not “surrealist” in the strict sense, but they illuminate the constellation of modern dreams: metamorphosed body, masked identity, spiritual vision, collage, unconscious, tale or mental image.

Where to start?

Three paths in feminine surrealism

To get in through the heart of the movement, start with Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, Toyen, Leonor Fini, Meret Oppenheim, Kay Sage, Eileen Agar and Ithell Colquhoun. For Mexico and magical realism, continue with Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo, Rosa Rolanda, Nahui Olin, Luchita Hurtado and Paula Rego.

To understand the broadening of the surrealist imagination, look at Claude Cahun, Hannah Höch, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hilma af Klint, Grete Stern, Lee Miller, Judith Reigl, Yayoi Kusama, Kiki Smith and Marlene Dumas: the dream becomes identity, collage, abstraction, obsession or memory of the body.

Another surrealism appears when we follow the female artists

This Top 50 shows a less doctrinaire, more international and often more intimate surrealism. It involves exile, alchemical cooking, the mask, animals, the bedroom, photomontage, color, storytelling, the body and inner visions.

By looking at these fifty trajectories together, we discover that the surrealist dream has never belonged to a single group: it circulates, transforms, and finds in these artists some of its freest images.

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