Whitney Chadwick

A beautifully written and elegantly constructed narrative that explores the intense, complex and far-reaching female friendships among the Surrealists during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The Militant Muse documents what it meant to be young, ambitious and female in the context of an avant-garde movement defined by celebrated men whose educational, philosophical and literary backgrounds were often quite different from...

Women, Art, and Society by Whitney Chadwick is an acclaimed study that challenges the assumption that great women artists are exceptions to the rule, transcending their gender to produce major works of art. While acknowledging the many women whose contributions to visual culture since the Middle Ages have often been neglected, Chadwick’s survey amounts to much more than an alternative...

This pioneering book stands as the most comprehensive treatment of the lives, ideas and artworks of the remarkable group of women who were an essential part of the Surrealist movement. Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim and Dorothea Tanning, among many others, became an embodiment of their age as they struggled towards artistic maturity and their own 'liberation of the spirit' in...