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In August 1934, Jacqueline Lamba married fellow artist André Breton in Paris, dressed in funeral black in an apparent dig at the institution of marriage. The two men had met only two and a half months earlier, during an “accidental” meeting secretly orchestrated by Lamba. Breton was immediately captivated by the “scandalously beautiful” woman, as he later described her in his 1937 surrealist short story, Crazy Love (Mad love).
Breton, as we know, later took on the role of “father” of surrealism, while Lamba’s work remained in relative obscurity until very recently. Some say the Surrealists were a particularly misogynistic group, whose male protagonists believed women were better off as muses than artists. Others disagree. Alyce Mahon, professor at the University of Cambridge and art historian, points out that women “participated extensively in experimenting with concepts and styles” and participated in group exhibitions at the time. “What we actually see is this avant-garde group empowering women. The Surrealists were the first to radically include women.”
Orphaned as a teenager and resolutely ambitious, Lamba was widely exhibited during her lifetime. It was included in the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris and in Peggy Guggenheim’s 1943 exhibition, 31 womenkept at the New York gallery of the American patron. In 1967, Picasso invited Lamba to mount a personal exhibition in his museum in Antibes. Recognition, however, waned towards the end of Lamba’s life. After the climax of the exhibition at the Picasso Museum, she refused to exhibit in a less prestigious place and her demands became more and more grandiose.
Since Lamba’s death in 1993, much of her inventory – around 100 canvases and several hundred works on paper – has been preserved by her and Breton’s daughter, Aube Elléouët-Breton. Another treasure 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 feels a responsibility to ensure her mother’s work is out in the world,” says Kendy Genovese, director of the Weinstein Gallery, based in San Francisco, which began working with Elléouët-Breton to show Lamba’s work in 2021.
At Art Basel Miami Beach, the gallery devotes its booth to Lamba, presenting works that reflect the three distinct phases of his career: early surrealist paintings and objects, expressionist landscapes, and more meditative canvases depicting streams and abstract skies that it developed over the time. 1960s. “Towards the end, Jacqueline went out into nature every day, drawing and painting. It was a meditation for her – and a complete reaction to the Abstract Expressionist idea that painting was action,” Genovese says. Prices at the booth range from about $58,000 to $290,000.
Recent critical reappraisal and a series of museum exhibitions have boosted the market for female surrealists such as Leonora Carrington. On the other hand, that of Lamba is a relatively untapped market: only 19 of his works have been put up for auction. “It’s an interesting thing to build a real primary market for someone who has been dead for decades and was doing this great work almost 100 years ago,” says Rowland Weinstein, who began showing surrealist women in his gallery more than 20 years ago. .
As Mahon points out, the market for these artists is only just beginning to catch up with research – and the task now becomes protecting the legacies of these women rather than simply going with the flow. Generally speaking, a rethinking of canonical history is underway, as evidenced by exhibitions such as Pompidou’s current surrealist blockbuster, in which men and women sit next to each other. But there is still much work to be done, both for museums and the market. As Mahon says: “Women’s art can fit into various narratives in many ways, but if you remove them, it looks like a white man’s story. And it’s not really a fair telling of a story – whether it’s her story or her story.
Weinstein GalleryStand S13 at Art Basel Miami Beach, December 6-8, 2024
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