Accord in g to We in in ger, women are. We in in ger saw in women essentially sexual. He imag in ed. Like in the pa in t in gs by Magritte, separate.
Like in Le Songe. It is in terest in g that the decadent no vel. Surrealist pa in ters used to show women in. A siren appears aga in in a no ther draw in g,. Both in terpretations fit the Surrealist vision of women as unk no wable be in gs - femmes fatales as dangerous as Hydras with a hundred head s - or possessed mediums who hear voices imperceptible to men, mad women who have lost their senses, women without head s. To this old-fashioned model the Surrealists opposed a new ideal of a creature full of no longer rapacious but passive sex, tempt in g with her accessibility and exist in g only to be looked at.
In Surrealist pa in t in gs, photographs, collages, and no vels - literally or metaphorically - women are devoid of faces or even deprived of head s. Faceless dolls can easily become the object of idealistic and egocentric amour fou. Nusch Eluard was the most perfect in carnation of a Surrealist muse : the in dulgent wife of a poet, a femme-enfant, and a lover for whom Paul Eluard wrote love poems; an eager p art icipant in Surrealist games from Exquisite Corpse to experiments in volv in g exchang in g p art ners ; an art ist who, while rema in in g in the shadow of famous men, made her own collages; a l patient model of Man Ray and Picasso.
When a young Nusch arrived in Paris from Berl in , she earned her life as a walk-on in a Guig no l theatre, rov in g the streets with a black mask on her face. That was how Eluard saw her for the first time: a passerby with a covered face, met by chance on a street.
A Surrealist master of ceremony could no t have created a more perfect beg in n in g. Facile was illustrated with eleven solarized portraits of Nusch made by Man Ray.
