Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.In August 1934, Jacqueline Lamba wed fellow artist André Breton in Paris, wearing funereal black in an apparent dig at the institution of marriage. The pair had met just two-and-a-half months earlier, in an “accidental” meeting that had been secretly orchestrated by Lamba. Breton was immediately captivated by the “scandalously beautiful” woman, as he later described Lamba in his 1937 Surrealist novella, L’Amour Fou (Mad Love).Breton, as we know, went on to take the mantle of the “father” of Surrealism, while Lamba’s own work has remained in relative obscurity until very recently. Some say that the Surrealists were a particularly misogynistic bunch, whose male protagonists believed that women were better off as muses, not artists. Others disagree. The Cambridge university professor and art historian Alyce Mahon points out that women “were very much a part of experimentations with concepts and styles” and took part in group exhibitions at the time. “What we actually see is women being empowered by this avant-garde group — the Surrealists were the first to radically include women.” Orphaned as a teenager and determinedly ambitious, Lamba was indeed widely exhibited during her own lifetime. She was included in the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris and Peggy Guggenheim’s 1943 exhibition, 31 Women, held in the US patron’s New York gallery. In 1967, Picasso invited Lamba to mount a solo show in his museum in Antibes. Recognition dwindled towards the end of Lamba’s life, however. After the high of the Picasso Museum exhibition, she refused to show anywhere less prestigious, and her demands grew increasingly grandiose.Since Lamba’s death in 1993, much of her inventory — an estimated 100 canvases and several hundred works on paper — has been kept in storage by her and Breton’s daughter, Aube Elléouët-Breton. Another trove was destroyed by Breton when Lamba left him in 1942 for the American sculptor David Hare. “For most of her life, Aube focused on her father’s work, and now she feels responsible for making sure that her mother’s work gets out in the world,” says Kendy Genovese, director of the San Francisco-based Weinstein Gallery, which began working with Elléouët-Breton to show Lamba’s work in 2021.At Art Basel Miami Beach, the gallery is dedicating its booth to Lamba, showing works that reflect the three distinct phases of her career: early Surrealist paintings and objects, expressionist landscapes and the more meditative canvases featuring abstracted streams and skies that she developed in the 1960s. “Towards the end, Jacqueline would go out into nature every day, sketching and painting. It was a meditation for her — and a complete reaction to the Abstract Expressionist idea that painting was action,” Genovese says. Prices on the booth range from approximately $58,000 to $290,000.Recent critical reappraisal and a raft of museum exhibitions have boosted the market for female Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington. By contrast, Lamba’s is a relatively untapped market — only 19 of her works have ever appeared at auction. “It’s an interesting thing to be building a truly primary market for somebody who’s been dead for decades and who was doing this great work almost 100 years ago,” says Rowland Weinstein, who first started showing female Surrealists in his gallery more than 20 years ago.As Mahon points out, the market for these artists is only now catching up with the research — and the task now is to protect these women’s legacies rather than just jumping on the bandwagon. Broadly speaking, a remapping of the canonical story is under way, as evidenced in exhibitions such as the Pompidou’s current Surrealism blockbuster, in which men and women sit alongside each other. But there is still a great deal of work for both museums and the market to do. As Mahon puts it: “There are many ways in which women’s art can fit into various narratives, but if you remove them it looks like a white male story. And that’s not actually a fair telling of any story — whether it’s his- or her-story.”Weinstein Gallery, Booth S13 at Art Basel Miami Beach, December 6–8, 2024 Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
