Masson's Gradiva: The Metamorphosis of a Surrealist Myth

* Part of this material was presented in a paper read at the College Art Association annual meeting, Boston, in January, 1969. I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Anthony Cutler for his constructive advice and criticism and to Mr. Albert Field, archivist, The Dali Archives, who located and supplied photographs for the Dali works cited.

Abstract

The cult of the erotic female lies at the heart of Surrealist theory and practice of the 1930's.¹ The most concentrated expression of this idea is the image of Gradiva, drawn from Freud and frequently recurring in the paintings and writings of Breton, Masson, Dali, Eluard and others.² To these artists she became the incarnation of that collective myth the creation of which Breton later described as fundamental to Surrealism's aspirations.³ To identify the motif and its sources without an attempt to elucidate the figure's connotations for the Surrealists is to misunderstand the central role of myth in the creative processes of the movement in its mature phase. It may be that the study of a single theme, used extensively by this diverse group in a large body of artistic, literary and theoretical works, will clarify the connections between Surrealism's intellectual incentives and its artistic productions. Such a study is necessarily limited in scope and does not attempt to contain the broad spectrum of ideas found in more general scholarly and critical treatments of the subject.⁴ But the Gradiva theme is worth examining in detail since it reveals the particular quality of the Surrealist imagination during this period, the literary sources and iconographic referents of certain works and the origins and interconnections of three major Surrealist themes after 1929: dream, desire and love.