Please join us on 18 November (5pm-6.30pm BST) for this virtual discussion to celebrate the launch of Surrealist Women Artists and Mental Illness (Manchester University Press, 2026), edited by Jenny Anger.

You can register for the event here.

Surrealist Women Artists and Mental Illness investigates the following unexplored intersection: Surrealist orthodoxy idealized feminine madness for its supposedly unfettered access to the unconscious. At the same time, an unusually large number of surrealist women artists experienced mental illness. Indeed, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Sonja Sekula, and Unica Zürn, among others, all suffered from maladies ranging from depression to schizophrenia—and all found their way into the surrealist movement.

It was an uncomfortable fit. Carrington was hospitalized due to psychosis, Kahlo likely had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Oppenheim struggled with depression, and Sekula’s and Zürn’s schizophrenia affected their art processes and products. How did women’s experience and their work intersect with the romanticized vision? Did these women—and others—see themselves in the surrealist ideal of feminine madness? Surrealist scholar Katharine Conley observes that the surrealist woman had “a potential for shock and consequently for reversal—the potential to step down from her pedestal and to create on her own.” How true was that observation for the surrealist woman with the added burden of mental illness, which complicates all aspects of life? Did these women find the masculine, surrealist dream of feminized madness prohibitive—or productive? This book explores how the work of these women pushed surrealism far beyond its mere idealization of feminine madness—and how actual feminine mental illness expanded and deepened surrealist art.

Jenny Anger, editor of the book (Professor Art History, Grinnell College), will introduce the study. She will be followed by two contributors to the book. Lee Colón (an art historian based in New York City) will speak about Meret Oppenheim, and Alessia Zinnari (Lecturer in Italian, University of Glasgow) will address Leonora Carrington.

You can purchase Surrealist Women Artists and Mental Illness here.

You can read a Q&A with the editor, Jenny Anger, here.