Surrealism in Yorkshire

Paper abstract

This paper explores the intersection of botany and Surrealism in Henry Moore’s sculptural practice, revealing an often-overlooked aspect of his work and its broader significance within British modern art. Historically, botanical art has been marginalized within art historical discourse, often dismissed as merely utilitarian. This neglect extends to the insufficient scholarly focus on botanical elements in sculptural practices. Similarly, the impact of Surrealism on sculpture has often been treated as a peripheral concern rather than a subject of focused critical inquiry.

This paper addresses these gaps by examining Moore’s engagement with plant morphology, both native and non-native, throughout his career, with a particular focus on the 1930s and 1940s – a period marked by his most sustained involvement with the Surrealist movement. Existing scholarship, including recent studies by Edward Juler and Ulrike Meyer Stump, has examined biomorphism, organicism, and the influence of scientific photography on British sculptors of the interwar period, including Moore. However, systematic investigations into the intersections of botanical studies and Surrealist influences in Moore’s work remain inadequate.

Focusing on Moore’s works from the 1930s to the 1950s – such as his earlier series of carved sculptures titled Composition (1932-33), Two Forms (1934), and the later Upright Internal/External Forms (1951-52) series – this paper demonstrates the fundamental role of botanical influences in shaping his visual language. It contends that Moore’s engagement with themes of growth, vitality, and organicism, traditionally associated with his oeuvre, reflects a conceptual framework rooted in bio-interconnectedness. This interpretation challenges the predominantly humanistic readings of Moore’s work advanced by writers such as Herbert Read and Geoffrey Grigson, and so far, uncontested,  and instead it aligns it with a broader ecological perspective, as proposed by Aloi’s concept of an “intersecting gaze.” Equally, this paper argues for the continued relevance and adaptability of Surrealism for sculptors like Moore, both technically and conceptually.

By situating Moore’s sculptures within the contexts of ethnobotany and ecological concerns, therefore, this paper questions established narratives of British modernism, and it advocates for a reassessment of Moore’s oeuvre as simultaneously ecological and Surrealist, emphasizing the centrality of plant morphology in his artistic innovation and ultimately offering new insights into his contributions to modernist sculpture.

About the speaker

Laura Bruni is a curator and art historian with a special interest in the intersections of modern art with emerging media and the broader visual cultures of the twentieth century. She is currently Curator of Exhibitions at the Henry Moore Foundation where she also served as Acting Senior Curator of Collections and Research from October 2023 to May 2024. Prior to joining the Henry Moore Foundation, Laura held curatorial positions at Tate, the Fondazione Calzolari, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Laura graduated with honours in Visual Arts (MA 2021) at the University of Venice and obtained a second level master’s degree in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London (2017).

Paper abstract

This talk approaches an aesthetics of the “traumatic surreal” – a term coined by Patricia Allmer (2022) – in the poetry of the Franco-Egyptian writer and artist Joyce Mansour, a Sephardic Jew who was born in Great Britain, raised in Caire, until she moved to Paris in 1956. With her poetry collections Cris (Cries, 1953) and Déchirures (Tearings, 1955) as well as her story Jules César (1955) Mansour’s work can be situated in the aftermath of the surrealist Art et liberté-movement. Art et liberté was composed of a group of Egyptian artists that radically appropriated Nazism’s discriminatory politics of degenerate art in order to violently attack the fascist bourgeois tendencies in contemporary Egyptian society.

In the Parisian surrealist circle of the afterwar, Mansour was celebrated as a female Marquis de Sade for the destructive, pornographic-sadomasochistic aesthetics of her work. Within the North African cultural context, Gremels approaches this aesthetics as an expression of the traumatic memory of the Shoah, which was followed by the marginalization of the Jewish and Francophone minorities in Egypt in the wake of Arabic nationalism and decolonialism in the 1950s. Gremels reads Mansour’s perversion of social and gender norms, her sadism, as well as her identification with Blackness and Africanness against the background of this transcultural trauma and politics of annihilation that haunt her as a Francophone Jewish writer in Egypt.

About the speaker

Andrea Gremels holds a full professorship for Western European Literatures at Europa-Universität Viadrina in Germany (interim). She has worked as a researcher and lecturer of Francophone and Hispanic Literatures and Cultures at the Department of Romance Studies at Goethe-University Frankfurt. She has published widely on Caribbean and Latin American literature, film, and other media, transcultural studies, postcolonial theory, and international surrealism. Her monograph Die Weltkünste des Surrealismus: Netzwerke und Perspektives aus dem Globalen Süden (The World Arts of Surrealism: Networks and Perspectives from the Global South, June 2022) focuses on the transnational connections of Surrealism between African, European, Latin American, and Caribbean writers and artists. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the André Breton Society in Paris and editorial board member of the International Journal of Surrealism. As fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation she has realised research stays in Paris, Berlin, and Mexico City.

Paper abstract

Eileen Agar’s connection to nature is reflected in both her displayed works as well as in her archival holdings at the Tate in London, and the presence of flora and fauna amongst various other materials creates a Surrealist Wunderkammer. Agar’s employment of botanical elements evokes major Surrealist moments, such as the marvellous and the uncanny.

This paper seeks to spotlight Agar’s use of flora which go beyond vegetal representation, introducing proxies for phyto-surrealist encounters. Heflin considers examples of these encounters in Agar’s work, such as Bernard Shaw Feeding the Birds, which features a plant specimen at its centre – including the root system as well as sprouted young plants, the stems and fully blossomed flowers – taken from a botanical slide now found in her archives. Removed from its botanical context, the element in this work floats mid-air next to a crescent moon and soaring birds, and now resembles something between a jellyfish and a palm-treed floating island.

In another instance, Agar employs wood frottage in Philemon and Baucis to depict two vertical planks of visibly different types of trees, likely oak and linden. Through the work’s title and the depiction, Agar echoes the Bretonian reference in Nadja and effectively narrates the entire Greek mythological tale of this couple whose fate ultimately brings them to spend eternity as these two arboreal species. Additionally, Heflin considers botanical scientific glass slides held in Agar’s archives which she left to the Tate, demonstrating her desire for a partially botanic legacy.

About the speaker

Christina Heflin is a lecturer at Parsons Paris and was recently a postdoctoral fellow at l’Université de Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne. She holds a PhD in Media Arts from Royal Holloway University of London, and her thesis Submerged Surrealism: Science in the Service of Subversion is under revision for publication. She is on the communications committee and on the journal’s board for the International Society for the Study of Surrealism. Christina recently authored ‘Aquatic Sensing in Jean Painlevé’s Early Filmic Environments’ for the forthcoming book Surrealism and Ecology and “Surrealism in England” in The Routledge Companion to Surrealism (2022).

Paper abstract

As is well known, Sigmund Freud saw childhood trauma as the root cause of adult neurosis. Ever since Freud, childhood, and threats to its assumed ‘innocence’ have preoccupied social analysts. At the same time children themselves have sometimes been perceived as malign forces. Consider, for instance, the public reactions to the killing of the toddler Jamie Bulger by children in 1993.

This paper tracks trauma in a post-surrealist imaging of the child, showing how the child emblematises it, or acts as its instigator. Beginning with a short discussion of Dorothea Tanning, the paper subsequently reveals how surrealist tropes such as the ‘femme enfant’ and the child phantom were revisited by US and British artists of the 1990s in socially-anxious contexts.

Tying in with his current exhibition at Tate, the US artist Mike Kelley will be a key figure in the paper. In works of the 1980s and 90s Kelley explicitly engaged with the idea of trauma in works concerned with ‘repressed memory syndrome’, which, in their deployment of children’s playthings, seemed to deal metaphorically with abuse. Less well known are Kelley’s works dealing with adolescent images of ghosts and the paranormal which also hint at psychological dysfunction and which will be examined closely here. In parallel with Kelley, British artists such as Susan Hiller and Wendy McMurdo produced work in explicitly post-surrealist modes showing girls and young women in states of trance or possession. What, finally, do such uncanny images tell us about trauma and modern childhood?

About the speaker

David Hopkins is Emeritus Professor of Art History and Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, UK. He has written widely on Dada, Surrealism and post-war European art and theory. His books include: Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2006); Dada’s Boys: Masculinity after Duchamp (Yale University Press, 2007) and After Modern Art 1945-2017 (OUP Oxford History of Art, 2nd edition, 2018). His recent books are Dark Toys: Surrealism and the Culture of Childhood (Yale UP, 2021) and Contagion, Hygiene and the Avant-Garde (2023), co-edited with Disa Persson, for Routledge.

Paper abstract

This paper considers the adoption of bricolage by two recent British surrealist artists, Anthony Earnshaw (1924-2001) and Peter Wood (1951-99), as a critical play with the hateful idea of work.

Small-scale object assemblage became central to the practice of both artists, and their shared experiences of a working class Yorkshire upbringing gave them both a heritage of humour and class consciousness, chanelled into a mutual discovery of (in Earnshaw’s words) the ‘frisky imp’ of surrealism. For Earnshaw, decades of graft in his Leeds workshop led to meticulous boxed riddles combined readymade elements with a dry wit, close to the laconic spirit of the Belgian surrealists. Pragmatic and crafted, they use an aphorist’s economy aligned with his training as a machine engineer, but it is the undoing of the notion of labour and value – in the spirit of Earnshaw’s mischievous cartoon character Wokker – that drives their wry DIY logic.

Wood, in contrast, settled in Paris where he worked as an artist, poet and translator, close to surrealists Joyce Mansour and Matta. His own assemblage practice derived from the chaotic collapsing together of disparate found objects: part carnival of baubles, part catalogue of obsessive junk. Made with a nonchalant disregard for craft, they stage a revenge against the scourge of work already announced in his 1979 broadside ‘Appeal against Life-Sentence to Hard Labour’; their strategies of recycling, memory and eroticism can be read as ways of exploding the structures of social hierarchy and necessity.

About the speaker

Krzysztof Fijalkowski is Professor of Visual Culture on the Fine Art programme, Norwich University of the Arts. As a writer his principal focus is the history, theory and practices of the international surrealist movement; areas of interest include surrealism’s engagement with photography and objects, and its histories in Central and Eastern Europe. His publications include (as co-editor/contributor) Surrealism: Key Concepts (2016) and The International Encyclopaedia of Surrealism (2019). He has also contributed essays for exhibition catalogues including Le Surréalisme (Centre Pompidou, 2024), Surrealism Beyond Borders (Tate, 2021) and Objects of Desire (Vitra Design Museum, 2019).

Paper abstract

This paper explores Surrealism and the theme of the ethnobotanic through a focus on the art and writings of Ithel Colquhoun (1906-1988) and an understanding of a ‘surrealist ecopoetics’ as advanced in Mahon’s book Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World (Yale 2025).

Drawing on André Breton’s long-held critique of the traditional Cartesian division between human and nature and his post-war explanation of the Surrealist enterprise as learning to “understand nature through ourselves and not ourselves through nature” in On Surrealism in its Living Works (1953), Mahon traces an ecopoetic aesthetic across a range of Colquhoun’s work. Considering her unpublished manuscript Lesbian Shore and novel Goose of Hermogenes (written in the late 1930s and published in full in 1961) and the suite of drawings she produced for the novel in 1955 as well as her better known paintings Sunflower (1936) Scylla (1938), and Tree Anatomy (1942), the paper demonstrates how the representation of flora across text and image illuminates her fusion of the surreal and occult and how the botanical surreal opened a means to represent queer desire.

Given the wider scholarly understanding of the vegetal imagination / deliria in the work of male surrealists such as Salvador Dalí, André Masson and Paul Nash, Mahon’s aim is to show how the botanical opened radical modernist avenues for the representation of female pleasure that have yet to be fully addressed and that allow us to expand, joyfully, the genre of landscape art for British Surrealism.

About the speaker

Alyce Mahon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and the Chair of the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968 (Thames & Hudson, 2005), Eroticism & Art (Oxford University Press, 2007), The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde (Princeton University Press, 2020), and Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World (forthcoming Yale, 2025) as well as the edited catalogue Dorothea Tanning (Reina Sofia/ Tate, 2018), and numerous essays on Surrealist, avant-garde, and feminist art. She is also the inaugural co-editor of the International Journal of Surrealism [IJS], published by University of Minnesota Press and serves on the Board of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism [ISSS]. Mahon curated SADE: Freedom or Evil for the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (2023), and Dorothea Tanning: Behind the Door, Another Invisible Door for the Museo Reina Sofia, that travelled to Tate Modern London (2018-2019). She frequently serves as curatorial advisor and specialist author for Surrealist exhibitions and catalogues including most recently for Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds (Tate St Ives & Tate Britain, 2025), Surréalisme (Centre Pompidou, 2024), Surrealism & Design Now: From Dalí to AI (Museum of Design, London, 2022-23); The Milk of Dreams, 59th Venice Biennale (2022); Surrealism & Magic (Peggy Guggenheim Collection & Barberini Museum, 2022), Maria Martins: Desejo Imaginante (MASP, Sao Paulo, 2021), Fantastic Women – Surreal Worlds. From Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo (Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 2020), Couples Modernes (Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2018) and Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire 1930-1990 (Museum of Sex, New York, 2018- 2019).

Paper abstract

The painting of Hervé Télémaque (1937-2022) serves a multi-layered exploration of trauma: historical, colonial and biographical, often focussed on the body, as well as a case study for the overlap between Surrealism and Pop art. When François Duvalier came to power in 1957, Télémaque left his native Haiti for the United States, only to depart for France in autumn 1961 due to the racism he witnessed and was subject to in the US. He experienced further racism in France, recorded in his paintings, but he also encountered friendship from Surrealists who would reproduce his work in their journal La Brèche: Action surréaliste. Although the dates usually given for his ‘Surrealist period’ are 1961-63, Télémaque was named by André Breton in 1965 among the ten most significant artists since the war, his painting was shown at the important Surrealist exhibition L’Écart absolu (1965) and he later contributed to the Surrealist journal L’Archibras (1967, 1968).

This paper carries out a close reading of Télémaque’s key painting Portrait of a Family (1962-63), reproduced in La Brèche in 1963, in the wake of the racism and racial family politics that led to the artist’s treatment by the pioneer of ethnopsychoanalysis, Georges Devereux. Examination of the traumatic body as it is portrayed in Portrait of a Family allows a new expanded Oedipal reading of the painting and related works as psychoanalytically charged responses to racism and authoritarianism that drew not just on Devereux’s writings, but also motifs in then current Surrealist art and emerging sources in popular culture.

About the speaker

Gavin Parkinson is Professor of European Modernism at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He has published numerous essays and articles, mainly on Surrealism. His books are Picasso: The Lost Sketchbook (Clearview Books 2024); Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism: Art History, ‘Sensibility’ and War (Bloomsbury 2023); Enchanted Ground: André Breton, Modernism and the Surrealist Appraisal of Fin-de-Siècle Painting (Bloomsbury 2018), Futures of Surrealism (YUP 2015), Surrealism, Art and Modern Science (YUP 2008), The Duchamp Book (Tate Publishing 2008) and the edited collection Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics (LUP 2015).

Paper abstract

This paper offers a comparison of regional surrealisms, focussing on Yorkshire and Sussex. It draws attention to the presence of North/South stereotypes in discussions about art. It considers, amongst others, the figure of Edward Wadsworth, who had connections with both Yorkshire and Sussex, and whose post-vorticism work is often loosely associated with surrealism.

The paper discusses what is at stake when artworks are claimed both for surrealism and for particular regions. It asks when and why booms in regional thinking occurred during the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the light of exhibitions such as Surrealism Beyond Borders (Tate 2022), the paper examines what is gained, as well as what is lost, when looking at artworks through a regional lens.

About the speaker

Dr Hope Wolf is a Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Sussex. Her book Sussex Modernism will be published by Yale University Press in 2025, and she is also curating an exhibition of the same title at Towner Eastbourne. Her recent work traces a history of assumptions about the ‘provincial’ and explores the relationship between regionalism and different modernist movements. Previous shows she has curated include A Tale of Mother’s Bones: Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff and the Birth of Psychorealism, which toured between the De La Warr Pavilion, Camden Arts Centre and Newlyn Art Gallery & the Exchange.