A Slew of Shows Celebrates Surrealist Women
Philomena Epps, frieze
September 2020
In IMAGO: Méret Oppenheim (1988) – a feature-length portrait of the German-born Swiss artist by Pamela Robertson-Pearce and Anselm Spoerri – Oppenheim (voiced by British actress Glenda Jackson) reflects on her experience within the Surrealist circle of Paris. Having moved to the city from Basel in 1932, at the age of 18, to study painting at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse, she remembered that: ‘For us women, Surrealism represented a world in which we could rebel against the conventions of our upbringing, and in which imagination was a key to a more liberated life […] of course, the dominance of men in the Surrealist group was the same as everywhere else, but with the difference that they accepted women as artists without prejudice.’ […]