Women of Surealism
Lise de Harme and Francos Ponge, The Feminist Art Journal
Spring, 1973
‘Bona de Mandiargues has written to me that she recently spoke out against the myth of the Femme-Enfant on a programme about Surrealism on French radio. She write: ‘it seems to me that every self-respecting artist is born a child – and dies a child; but that the ‘woman-child’ is merely a doll, a pin-up, or a stip tease artist’. Bona is niece of the Italian artist Filippo de Pisis. She was born in 1926 in Italy and owes her origins and Surrealist roots to Ferrare ‘the metaphysical city’ where the esoteric movement was born. When her father died in 19 to live permanently with her uncle, de Pisis.
In 1950 she married the Surrealist writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues, and began to participate in the meeting of the Surrealist group in Paris. She writes that Surrealism incarnated for her the love that she sought. It was the living symbol of freedom, yet at times denied her personal freedom, until she had passed through the trials of initiation which permitted her to freely enter their world. Then she discovered the pleasure of writing dreams, of reading all the writers that the Surrealists loved, of talking for hours in the cafe with Aragon, Elsa, Eliza and André Breton, and of loving all the art that the Surrealists loved, particularly the Italian Renaissance; she owes to Surrealism the fact that it permitted her to discover ‘la cle des champs”.