SESSION: How British is British Surrealism, 1936-2026?

This panel invites analysis of the histories of British Surrealism between its arrival on British shores as marked by the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London and its recent mapping on the national and international stage in centenary exhibitions of Surrealism in
2024-2026. The first generation of British surrealists were largely presented as the heirs to the English Romantics, and/or as following in the black humour of Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll. Women surrealists, including Eileen Agar, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun and Edith Rimmington, turned to the British landscape and Celtic folklore for their surrealist magic and occultism. And today a diverse group of practitioners – including Yasmina Atta, Linder, Yinka Shonibare, Penny Slinger, and Marianna Simnett – cite Surrealism in their
exploration of the absurd, the colonial, the sexually taboo and the fairytale.

Is there a particular Britishness at work across these aesthetic interests over the past century? Is the label ‘British Surrealism’ useful today?

Session Convenors:

Alyce Mahon, University of Cambridge

Session Speakers:

Doriana Bruccoleri, University of Palermo

Malice in Wonderland. Surrealism and British Humour in Cecil Beaton’s Fashion Photography

Cecil Beaton was an illustrator, writer, photographer, and quintessential English dandy who introduced an ironic and surreal sensibility into fashion photography, marked by artifice, theatricality, and absurdity. This paper explores how Beaton’s work for “Vogue” during the 1930s and 1940s translated surrealist ideas into the visual language of fashion photography, creating a distinctly British reinterpretation of Surrealism rooted in humour. 

Drawing on art history and image theory, the research analyses how Beaton’s photographs transform British humour into a visual device that resonates with surrealist aesthetics, particularly through the strategy of dépaysement in the commercial field of advertising. Utilizing unconventional props, photomontage, and theatrical sets, Beaton turned fashion photography into a surreal visual laboratory. 

For Beaton, Surrealism was not just an influence; he actively engaged with avant-garde artists, translating their ideas into the fashion world. In the December 1936 issue of “Vogue Paris”, he created a photograph à la manière de Salvador Dalí, featuring designs by Schiaparelli that were inspired by Dalí’s work and echoed surrealist imagery circulating in the London art scene that year.  Beaton’s use of irony merges dandyism and camp, offering a uniquely British response to Surrealism that redefines the relationship between fashion and the avant-garde. By examining this intersection, the paper highlights the cultural and aesthetic significance of fashion magazines as laboratories for modern visual experimentation. 

Murdo Macdonald, University of Dundee

Celtic Surrealism and Glasgow Publishing

This paper focuses on the influence of Surrealism on artists and writers linked to the publisher William Maclellan in Glasgow in the 1940s and 1950s, in particular William Crosbie and Ruthven Todd. Crosbie studied at Glasgow School of Art and subsequently in Paris with Leger and Maillol, culminating in 1939 when he returned to Glasgow. He produced outstanding work for Maclellan from 1943 onwards, which indicates familiarity with not only the art of his teachers but Picasso’s Guernica, Braque’s Hesiod works and Dali’s indeterminate spaces. Crosbie’s depiction of standing stones to convey indigeneity, notably when illustrating the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean’s seminal collection Dain do Eimhir, resonates with Ithell Colquhoun’s contemporaneous interest in such stones in her Cornish work. I give historical context by noting the shift in perception of standing stones from antiquarian to sculptural including George Harvey’s Callernish (c 1863) and Paul Nash’s Avebury watercolours in the 1930s. In 1944, Maclellan published Ruthven Todd’s poetry The Acreage of the Heart – Todd is best known for rescuing Salvador Dali from his diving suit at the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, while his essay book Tracks in the Snow (Grey Walls Press, 1946), which explores the work of William Blake, Henry Fuseli, and John Martin, will be presented as offering the visual and intellectual roots of a peculiarly British Surrealism.

Janeth Alejandra García Herrera, Freie Universität Berlin

Being British in Mexico: a reading of the work and correspondence of Leonora Carrington and Edward James

In 1976, the British surrealist poet and benefactor Edward James wrote an introduction for the catalogue of a major exhibition in the United States of his friend and compatriot Leonora Carrington. The text begins by referencing madness and voyage to characterise Carrington’s work. Afterwards, it describes how her paintings and short stories embody or transform diverse temporal and geographical identities: Celtic, Mexican, Renaissance, and even Greek. James himself applied a similar approach in the construction of his surrealist garden in Xilitla, México, by combining architectural styles from different eras and distant parts of the world. Nevertheless, their work and letters might reveal a particular sense of Britishness as a counterpoint to the Mexican realities they are both experiencing. This presentation aims to explore the complex view of British identity in the correspondence and artistic work of Leonora Carrington and Edward James, considering the influence of surrealist internationalism and ideas of dépaysement together with their experience of living in México. The definition of surrealist exile by Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron and the “Reflections on exile” by Edward Said are useful to understand the critical and privileged point of view that both artists developed over their own country, customs, art, and culture, as well as the type of links to Britain they chose to keep in their artistic work. 

Anna Reid, University of Leeds

Eileen Agar at Puerto de la Cruz

This paper examines the political aesthetics of works by the Argentine-British artist and surrealist Eileen Agar (1899-1991) made in the Canary Islands (northern Tenerife) in the 1950s. Agar’s archive contains a striking range of photographs, paintings and visual materials related to this period in the artist’s life. In the post-war years, Agar travelled recurrently to Puerto de la Cruz, where she stayed at an eighteenth-century house and orchid garden, Sitio Litre, hosted by her friend Mollie Gordon. Agar travelled to Tenerife by steamer ships via routes well established by British plantation owners and marketed to British tourists from the 1930s onwards (Fyffes, for example, worked with plantation sites on Jamaica and Tenerife). The island’s botanical diversity was of vital interest to colonial science, and the naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and Marianne North were both guests at Sitio Litre before Agar. 

I ask how and to what extent the queer and surrealist aesthetics of Agar’s charged and dreamlike works intervene in or transcend the colonial and exoticist visual culture and landscape of ‘British’ northern Tenerife. With Peder Anker’s description of British ‘imperial ecology’ in addition to Krista Thompson’s description of ‘tropicalisation’ (in the context of the plantation landscapes of Jamaica) in mind, I will argue for Agar’s contribution to Surrealism’s broader imaginary of Tenerife as a compelling surrealist ecopoetics that exceeds a British colonial framing.