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The portrayal of women as muses was a familiar surrealist
theme. Believing that women had a closer connection to the
desired irrationality of dreams than men, they pictured them
as alluring sorceresses, child-women, and quasi-magical beings.
In Max Ernst's painting The Robing of the Bride (1940),
for instance, a female figure is transformed into an alluring,
bird-like creature.
This way of presenting women was intended to elevate rather
than diminish the female sex, but ran the risk of seeming
to cast women as a passive foil to male creativity, without
a voice of their own. From the mid-1930s, however, a growing
number of women artists and poets were attracted to the movement.
Many adopted existing surrealist imagery, often assuming the
role of muse themselves. In Dorothea Tanning's Birthday
(1942), the artist appears as a bare-breasted enchantress.
Like several of the works shown here, there is a tension in
the painting that suggests a degree of unease about this form
of self-representation.
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Dorothea Tanning, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1946,
Tate © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2001
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