The dreamer, not the dream

To see why this self-portrait is a break, look at where women stood in Surrealism before it. Overwhelmingly, they stood inside the frame, not behind the easel. The woman in mainstream Surrealist painting was the object: the muse, the dreamed-of body, the male artist’s living symbol of desire and the unconscious. The movement’s founder, the writer André Breton, made a slogan of “convulsive beauty,” and the women of Ernst, Magritte, Dalí and Man Ray are, again and again, beautiful bodies arranged to mean something for the man who painted them. Women appeared in Surrealist pictures far more often than they made them. The dreamer was a man; the woman was the dream.

And here is a young woman Surrealist painting her own dream-symbolism and her own animal-kin self. She is both the one who sees and the thing seen, the seer rather than the object. Read off the choices, because each one reverses the usual arrangement. She dresses herself in androgynous riding clothes instead of the eroticized nude. She stares back out of the canvas instead of being arranged for a viewer’s pleasure. She pairs herself not with a man’s symbol but with a femaleanimal of her own choosing, the lactating hyena, a creature she had already made her surrogate in her own stories. The picture quietly asserts authorship and autonomy: the woman is the maker of the dream, not a figure inside someone else’s. That is the break, and Carrington made it at about twenty, in a movement that had cast her sex in the opposite role.