Female mental illness has been a prominent and complicated theme in surrealist cultural traditions, including the idealisation of women with mental illness in works such as Andre Breton's Nadja (1928). Art historians have examined this tendency before, but to date there has been no comprehensive study of the lived reality of women surrealist artists with mental illness. How did women's experience and their work intersect with this romanticised vision? Was the masculine dream of feminised, 'mad' genius prohibitive or productive for these women artists? After establishing the ideological field within which these women worked, the book turns to case studies of well-known and some lesser-known artists, including ngeles Santos, Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, Claude Cahun, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Sonja Sekula, and Unica Zrn. This collection of essays contains a wide range of responses, revealing surrealism's generative as well as restrictive force.
