Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, and Partnership [Hardcover]

Renee Riese Hubert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1994

Although notorious for their idiosyncrasies, the surrealists revived artistic collaboration as an honorable and productive practice. Most of the famous surrealists were men, yet almost all were involved with women artists who were much more than sources of romantic inspiration. Precious little attention has been given to this most intricate of partnerships.

Magnifying Mirrors is the first study of the complex partnerships that stimulated and provoked these men and women. Each couple collaborated in its own unique way according to the varying importance ascribed to aesthetic, social, and political preoccupations.

The twelve couples whom Renée riese Hubert describes are Sophie Taeuber and Hans Arp; Valentine and Roland Penrose; Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst; Unica Zurn and Hans Bellmer; Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy; Lee Miller and Man Ray; Aliced Rahon and Wolfgang Paalen; Remedios Varo and Benjamin Peret; Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann; and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Often the woman in a partnership, far younger than her male companion, had just begun her career as an artist and had entered the relationship as a junior partner in need of support and guidance. Not surprisingly, her association usually resulted in, and often ended with, an intense assertion of independence. In her examination of these partnerships, Hubert focuses on comparing the art that the couples produced, apart or together.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Professor Hubert gives us a whole new understanding of Surrealism and of the way male and female artists of the movement worked together or side by side to produce astonishing works. Hubert has opened up a vast area that will surely be a subject of major discussion in the years to come."—Marjorie Perloff, author of The Futurist Moment

(Marjorie Perloff )

About the Author

The author of well over a hundred articles, texts, and books of poetry, Renée Riese Hubert is a professor emerita of comparative literature and French at the University of California, Irvine.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 425 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press; 1St Edition edition (May 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803223706
• ISBN-13: 978-0803223707
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 7.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,156,320 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #60 in Books > Arts & Photography > Schools, Periods & Styles > Surrealism

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Customer Reviews

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3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, December 20, 2011

By 

Lisa Yount (El Cerrito, California United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, and Partnership (Hardcover)

André Breton and other theorists of the Surrealist movement viewed women as muses and subjects of art, not as artists in their own right--yet many male Surrealists had affairs with, or even married, women who ultimately established substantial artistic reputations of their own. A careful study of the personal and artistic relationships within these couples could do much to illuminate, not only the work of the artists themselves, but the gender issues that affected artists, especially women artists, during the period of the 1930s through 1950s. I hoped that this book would present such a study, but unfortunately, it does not. It provides surprisingly little biographical information on the individuals or on their personal interaction, focusing mainly on detailed analysis--but only sometimes direct comparison--of specific works. I was further frustrated to see that most of the illustrations are in black and white, and only about half of the works described in detail appear at all.

I sampled two essays, those on Kay Sage-Yves Tanguy and on Lee Miller-Man Ray. The Sage-Tanguy essay was particularly unsatisfying. It gives almost no biographical information on either artist, and some of what it does give is inaccurate. It analyzes Sage's works in seemingly random order and compares them with those of Tanguy in only a few instances. The chapter on Miller and Ray was better, but concentrates more on their fashion photographs than on their more obviously Surrealist works.

Hubert is to be praised for including some less well known couples, such as Alice Rahon and Wolfgang Paalen, along with famous ones such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. However, her list contains some striking omissions, most notably Max Ernst-Dorothea Tanning. She covers Ernst in connection with Leonora Carrington, but his relationship with Carrington was relatively brief, whereas he actually married Tanning and spent his life with her after he moved to the United States.