How Surrealist Women Artists Took a Radical Approach to Family Dynamics

One hundred years since the Surrealist movement began, its themes remain searingly relevant. This year, a major touring exhibition led by the Centre Pompidou has captured the enduring and more popular subjects of Surrealism, such as dreams and psychoanalysis. Other exhibitions have homed in on the individual offerings of the movement’s famous names, such as “Man Ray Liberating Photography” at the Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland; or “Dalí: Disruption and Devotion” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. However, there are many lesser known themes in the Surrealists’ works, such as family, with many works exploring this subject made by women artists.

In new exhibitions at the U.K.’s Henry Moore Institute and Hepworth Wakefield, the lesser discussed theme of family and generational trauma comes into focus. Some featured artists grapple with their parents’ role in World War II, while others address the oppression of women within the traditional family home. Ultimately, Surrealism gave women artists a way to explore the complex, entangled nature of the family unit and broader political and social constructions. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, saw the family as one of several repressive structures that needed to be dismantled, writing in his 1924 manifesto for the movement: “Everything remains to be done, every means must be worth trying, in order to pay waste to the ideas of family, country, religion.”

Surrealism was an innovative, unorthodox movement that enabled artists to throw off many constrictive ideals that find shape and form in the traditional family. For many women, Surrealism enabled a powerful reckoning with the past, and a reassertion of female life in the post-war world whose value stretches far beyond the family home.These artists, especially those coming to prominence after World War II, witnessed how the family unit was used as a propaganda tool for Nazi recruitment, and a structure relentlessly pulled apart for those oppressed by the regime.

“The Traumatic Surreal,” on view through March 16, 2025, at the Henry Moore Institute, focuses entirely on German, Swiss, Austrian, and Luxembourgish women artists from the post-war generation, such as Renate Bertlmann, Pipilotti Rist, and Ursula. Inspired by co-curator Patricia Allmer’s 2022 book of the same name, the show explores how the shadow of World War II, and the first wave of Surrealists from the 1920s and ’30s, shaped the artists who came after. Some of these artists can be seen working through their own family’s war experiences, and the ensuing pride, fear, or shame that ensued. As such, their works are flooded with nightmarish and escapist references: Metal cages abound, situated among spikes protruding proudly from breasts and an abundance of animal fur and feathers.

“I think all the artworks are significant in different ways in their registering of the effects of personal, family, and historical trauma,” Allmer said. “Surrealism’s interest in the unconscious, dreams, and the psychic life makes it ideal as a register of these generational traumas, which are often only perceivable indirectly and certainly only experienced at a distance by post-war generations of artists.”

Méret Oppenheim takes a central place in the exhibition, as one of the early adopters of Surrealism. Her work is influenced by her own family’s experiences during World War II. A German-born artist of Jewish heritage, she fled to Switzerland with her family at the outbreak of the conflict and was said to have fallen into a depression and creative block that lasted for over a decade after the war ended. The artist destroyed much of the work that she made in this period. This was not the first time that state violence impacted her family; shortly after she was born, her father was conscripted into the army to fight in World War I, and she moved to Switzerland with her mother to live with her grandparents.

Her whimsical sculptures have a sinister edge, reflecting her own experiences of familial displacement and oppression during the war. Many of Oppenheim’s works are full of contradictions, highlighting the hypocrisies of post-war societies that attempted to regroup in the proceeding years. Her Squirrel (1969) sits at the entrance to the exhibition, a miniature piece consisting of a beer mug with an upright fluffy tail attached. The brutality of this soft, tactile object is implicit: It has been chopped clean off the squirrel’s body. Both the mug and squirrel have been “spoiled” in some way, perhaps revealing Oppenheim’s feeling towards the family unit and broader societal structures in the post-war years.

Birgit Jürgenssen was born in 1949, and it was only later in life that she discovered her family’s complicity in the Nazi regime. Artmaking was discouraged by her parents, and her feminist, avant-garde pieces process her own family history and are a wider critique of the fascist regime. In the decades after the war, her work reflected the repressed legacy of Hitler’s Europe, acknowledging that covert support and its connected beliefs were still woven through the collective consciousness.

Jürgenssen often placed household items in compositions that have an unnerving impact. In Caught Happiness (1982), she utilizes cages and aggressive cogs, all painted gold; Untitled (Dog) (1972) is a small sculpture showing soft guts spilling from a ceramic hound, as though its dark inner world is falling from its neatly packed external form. Meanwhile, Untitled (Zipfel) (1967) presents a mass of soft textiles taking on a gut-like shape, squeezed tightly into a bell jar. Her pieces address the long-term impact of fascist ideology through the roles and restrictions placed on Austrian women, in the home and beyond. The domestic realm of the family, in Jürgenssen’s work, is shown to be tainted.

Similarly, filmmaker and artist Bady Minck’s family were part of the resistance during World War II, two decades before she was born. Her work continued this activism, using Surrealism as a tool to resist fascist tendencies within the culture through a feminist lens. She is one of the more contemporary artists in the exhibition, with her 2005 stop-motion piece Beauty Is the Beast depicting the body overrun with fur in an act that is both chilling and seductive. The most famous shot from the work features a protruding tongue covered in gray fluff. The idea of metamorphosis is central to this work, which subverts the gendered sexualization of women’s mouths and challenges the strict gender distinctions of the Nazi ideology.

At the Hepworth Wakefield show, on Surrealists’ use of landscapes, the claustrophobia and sometimes malicious undercurrents of the family structure is visualized in heady ways. Edith Rimmington’s Family Tree (1938) is a combination of photomontage and painting, which contrasts a giant, heavy chain with the freedom of the sea around it. A snake slithers out from underneath the metal structure. The work is ambiguous, with the chain providing two possible readings on family: an unbreakable and solid structure that links one generation to the next, or a restrictive and oppressive form that demands uniformity and obedience—especially from its women. The serpent, which could be missed on first glance, is a symbol of the Christian beginnings of family in the Garden of Eden, and as a poisoning, destructive force.

Also included is Maria Berrío’s Solstagia (2024). Her works focus on families that are displaced or torn apart, and often feature women and young people. She was originally inspired to make them following headlines about the Trump administration separating mothers and children at the U.S.–Mexico border. Here, the idea of home is central, as the work’s heroine finds her own land unfamiliar due to environmental change. The work depicts a woman moving through a post-apocalyptic landscape as her psyche breaks down, without family and utterly alone in a strange place.