Double vision

Surrealism's women thought they were celebrating sexual emancipation. But were they just fulfilling men's erotic fantasies? By Germaine Greer
Salvador Dali's "Mae West's lips" sofa
Salvador Dali's Mae West's Lips sofa

Among the "surreal things" to be celebrated at the V&A's exhibition this month is the human body. The body when separated from its identity - or soul, if you prefer - becomes just another thing. In her book The Surreal Body, written to accompany the exhibition, Ghislaine Wood struggles mightily to present the body that "the surrealists endlessly manipulated and fetishised" as unisex or ambisex, but it is actually feminine. Not female. Feminine. Even in the deliberately dis-gendered figure of Claude Cahun, the operation of narcissism is purely feminine. Herbert Bayer mugging at his naked and mutilated self in the mirror is feminine. Hans Bellmer's dolls are all, horribly, feminine.

In our polarised culture, in which real men may not be treated as mere body, and women must consider themselves primarily body, the portrayed body becomes the feminised body, regardless of its sex. At the same time that the women of surrealism were endlessly arraying and portraying themselves, as often in carefully posed photographs as in any other medium, the men of surrealism were disappearing into short back and sides, and suits and ties. Femininity was all image; masculinity had no image at all. Real men don't look in mirrors.

Few people would recognise the surrealist poet Paul Eluard in a photograph. His second wife, Nusch Eluard, by contrast, was so often photographed by Dora Maar and Man Ray that she could be said to be the actual surreal body. She was slim, high-breasted, virginal, eyebrows plucked to a thin line, never without lipstick. Nusch fancied herself an artist; her entire output of photomontages is worth nowhere near as much as a single Picasso sketch of her. Even an artist as committed as Eileen Agar was prepared to drape herself in nipple-revealing georgette to be photographed dancing on a roof. A feminist art historian commenting on Whitney Chadwick's book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement described Chadwick's insistence on the beauty of the women artists as irrelevant, when of course it was not. The male surrealists were in thrall to it, but, more importantly, so were the artists themselves.

Meret Oppenheim is supposed to have described her famous Objet (Le Déjeuner en Fourrure), the fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon, as "the image of femininity imprinted in the minds of men and projected on to women". Reification, according to the feminist orthodoxy of the 1980s, is something that men do to women; Oppenheim's judgment, if she ever really uttered it, could have been made by any lecturer in elementary feminist theory.

In this conventional scenario, we must identify the men of surrealism as those who sought out sexual partners who corresponded to their fantasy and then forced fetishistic roles upon them. Eluard wrote poems about Nusch, and published them in a collection called Facile, with nude pictures of her by Man Ray. He certainly wanted and orchestrated her exhibitionism, but did he actually create it? Perhaps Leonora Carrington's narcissism was imposed on her by Max Ernst, but it seems as likely that it is an aspect of female self-fashioning at any time, and does not correspond in any way to demands made by a male partner.

Indeed, it may be partly or entirely delusional. Léonor Fini's endless elaborations of her own likeness are unlikely to have been carried out in response to prompting from any of her "legions of lovers". Fini was convinced that she was inventing her own ideal of femininity: sensual, powerful, merciless. To a jaundiced eye, it is more of the same: huge hair, virginal breasts, tiny waists, long legs, Barbie before Barbie.

The woman of surrealism is certainly stereotypical, but the stereotype seems to exist before the art, which is largely a capitulation to it. The women who walk through Delvaux's dreamscapes, for example, are all identical. If there is an exception to the slender maidens of the surrealist dream it is Gala Dalí, whose body is heavier and older than the fashionista stereotype and is used by Salvador Dalí in a very different way. The effect of Dalí's work depends upon illusionistic painting; the portrayed objects and creatures must look even more real than they would in photographs. Dalí always lights Gala's body harshly from a single source, accentuating imperfections, the loose flesh on the arms, for example. The world of the female surrealist - Carrington, Fini or Remedios Varo, say - is stage-lit, gloomy perhaps, but without shadows. Dalí never lengthens Gala's legs by so much as an inch.

Her hands are always capable, grasping or demonstrating. Her shoulders are slightly bowed. Even when she is mockingly cast as a goddess or a madonna, she always looks like herself. In leaving Eluard for Dalí, Gala escaped into a freer, more playful and at the same time more serious way of life.

Gala is the best known muse of the surrealist movement, but she is also the woman who had least in common with surrealist fashion. Surreal Things tracks the process by which the stereotypical female figure in surrealist photographs, poetry and painting, stepped into the shop window as the store-front mannequin. Where once Eileen Agar had to wear her hat made of gloves and her hat made of seafood herself, the mannequins would now wear Elsa Schiaparelli's rather more timid extravagances, a hat vaguely like a shoe, a gown with lines of padded quilting. Dalí was part of this activity, but he never subjected Gala to it. Indeed, when he had to deal with mannequins, he was likely to replace their heads with clumps of greenery.

The puzzle must remain: when Man Ray posed a nude woman as half a coat-stand in 1920, was he turning her into a servile object, or was he protesting against her own view of herself as a servile object? Today's growing girls are obsessed by supermodels who are ever more extravagant versions of the surrealist stereo-type, whose gorgeous heads might as well be replaced with clumps of greenery, for all the thinking they are allowed to do. We can't blame men for this, can we? ·