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Frida's "What the Water Gave Me" in 3rd place of ARTnews ranking of the 32 Best Surrealist Artworks
10 October 2024
On the occasion of the centenary of Surrealism ARTnews has compiled a ranking of the 32 most important works of the movement.
During the years, women have been frequently mentioned in Surrealist histories, and recently mainly thanks to the 2022 Venice Biennale's female-focused theme and the reprint of art historian Whitney Chadwick's book on the subject.
A significant change has begun in surrealism and some conceptual issues recur throughout the movement: the importance of sexual liberation, the value of irrationality, the seduction of dreams, and the necessity of overthrowing the bourgeoisie. Many outside of the West add opposing colonialist oppression and dismantling Europe's fixation with reason and empiricism to these considerations. Additionally, women discovered a path to liberation from patriarchy in surrealism, despite the fact that their male colleagues occasionally forced them out of the spotlight.
ARTnews has attempted to map out the movement's finest 32 works in light of the recently expanded perspective and Frida Kahlo is in third place with the painting What the Water Gave Me notably included in a 1938 Julien Levy Gallery exhibition in New York.
Like other women on this list, Frida Kahlo did not consider herself a Surrealist, although on occasion it appeared that André Breton himself had classified her as such. Many have made theories as to why this occurred. In the artist's own words, she is from Mexico: “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” Some have provided different explanations; Chadwick, for example, has written that women were so alienated by the movement's male-dominated French core that they were reluctant to ally with it.
The subject matter of the painting seems to imply a connection to surrealism. It shows Kahlo's feet in a bathtub, with a number of surreal images floating above it, including a water-spraying shell, a skyscraper rising from an erupting volcano, a massive bird perched on a tree, and a woman's dress. Many of these images were mysterious to the viewers who passed in front of them, and some had already appeared in earlier Frida's paintings.
Returning to Kahlo's original statement, the painting does, in fact, depict reality, and it is obvious that the artist is the owner of that reality. Anatomically true to her own body, she has included details such as a twisted toe and a scar down one thigh, which are all references to the surgeries Kahlo underwent in the years before this painting was created. Furthermore, the piece asks the audience to see the subject as Kahlo might have seen her, placing them in Kahlo's perspective. Though scientifically impossible, the strange plants and animals above her do not always follow reason's rules, and Kahlo was unable to explain some of her experiences, most notably the 1925 bus accident that broke her back and her leg.
Click here for the ARTnews articleby Alex Greenberger.
