A Forgotten Surrealist Finally Comes Into Focus

Dear Readers,

This week, we turn our attention not just to a book that’s a hidden gem, but to a book about a forgotten artist of the 20th-century art world. Too often, art history remembers women by proximity: wife, lover, model. Jacqueline Lamba, if remembered at all, is often recalled as the muse of André Breton’s famous Surrealist work, Mad Love (L’Amour fou).

Jacqueline Lamba: The Forgotten Surrealist by Salomon Grimberg is a complete portrait of a woman who struggled to be herself but was cursed with great beauty, which kept her from becoming the person she was. She was as difficult as she was brilliant, an artist whose extraordinary life and visionary paintings have been overlooked until now.

Salomon Grimberg restores her to the legacy history denied her — an artist in her own right with her own story, not merely as Breton’s wife, but as a significant Surrealist whose work deserves serious reconsideration.

Lamba’s life placed her in the charged orbit of 20th-century modernism. She knew and moved among figures such as Dora Maar, Paul Éluard, Man Ray, Leonora Carrington, Alberto Giacometti, Roberto Matta, Yves Tanguy, Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera. After Breton, she married American sculptor David Hare, and Grimberg also explores, through previously unpublished letters, her affair with fellow artist Frida Kahlo.

But the book’s real strength is its refusal to treat biography as gossip. Salomon Grimberg, a psychiatrist and art historian recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on Kahlo and the Surrealist movement, draws on interviews and archival material and pays close attention to Lamba’s surviving artworks to make the case for her artistic importance.

That case is complicated by Lamba herself: brilliant, difficult, restless and famously unsparing toward her own art, sometimes destroying paintings she deemed inadequate. The plate section, featuring images of her extant work and photographs with major artists of the period, provides a glimpse of what the historical record has too often obscured, as well as a sense of regret for all that has been lost to time and circumstance.

For readers interested in Surrealism, feminism or the recovery of overlooked women artists, Jacqueline Lamba: The Forgotten Surrealist offers a timely act of restoration. It brings Lamba out of the background and into the frame, where she belongs.

Happy Reading!