When we think of Surrealist artists, our minds generally go to such painters as Salvador Dali, Juan Miro and Rene Magritte—all men. But there are a number of powerful women Surrealist painters, most of whom are less well known, who worked in the more progressive United States and Mexico, rather than in Europe where old-world male dominance, even in the arts, was still 
the rule. As the exhibit notes, “Intelligent, creative women have long been considered a threat to the stability of patriarchal societies.”
In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, currently at LACMA through May 6, is a beautifully hung exhibit that curves invitingly through the newer Resnick Pavilion. Names like Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois and Lee Miller are represented, as well as less familiar artists. Most of the women use their medium to investigate their own psychological identity and physicality in works that are deeply provocative.
For example, a Kahlo double self-portrait, “Las Dos Fridas,” represents her in traditional Mexican garb (also more feminine and demure) and in more typical U.S. attire (more masculine and confrontive)—two sides of her personality connected by their emerging hearts. A Dorothea Tanning self-portrait, “The Birthday,” depicts her 
unsmiling and bare-breasted in exotic dress, standing on a slanted floor that leads through an infinite recession of doors, accompanied by a mythical furry creature.
As excerpted in a poem by Louis Aragon that is part of the exhibit, “There is a surrealist light in the eyes of every woman.”
—Abigail Lewis
