Alice Rahon’s Self-Portrait (Autorretrato) is one of the most significant works of her oeuvre. Not only does Self-Portrait signal Rahon’s fully realized autonomous self, she also strategically employs one of the most traditional genres of painting—and one regularly used by her fellow women surrealists—as a subversive vehicle to question and address the topics of identity-duality, femininity and gender roles (Ilene Susan Fort and Tere Arcq, “Introduction” in In Wonderland, The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, (exhibition catalogue), New York, 2012, p. 28).

While Surrealism granted the women artists associated with the movement a “freedom that no previous aesthetic had offered”, the maturation of their artistic production fully flourished upon their respective, physical distance from André Breton’s Paris and their integration within new, cultural contexts that had very little in common with the European avant-garde (Whitney Chadwick, “Prologue”, ibid, p. 11 -20). 20). The surrealism of the 1930s, and for much of its legacy onward, propagated the idea of the femme-enfant, the “woman-child, who through her purity and naiveite, possessed a direct path to a state of the unconscious” (Ilene Susan Fort and Tere Arcq, “Introduction”, ibid, p. 19). Having officially become a member of Breton’s surrealist circle in 1935, the French poet Alice Rahon, who happened to be both young and beautiful, was quickly extolled for her embodiment of seductive power coupled with carrying a child-like gaze; more specifically the male surrealists saw her “as an embodiment of Lewis Carroll’s [literary character] Alice” from the 1865 novel “Alice in Wonderland” (Whitney Chadwick, Farewell to the Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism, New York, 2017, p. 18). The duality of her feminine existence was further propagated later on in 1937, when she served as “the model for the female-half of a glass door designed by Marcel Duchamp for Gallery Gradiva”, the short-lived Parisian gallery on the rue de Seine; her body serving as a talisman for the women artists’ role at-large as sexualized muse (See Fig. 1) (Ilene Susan Fort and Tere Arcq, “Introduction” in In Wonderland, The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, (exhibition catalogue), New York, 2012, p. 21).

Alice Rahon’s arrival in Mexico in 1939 marked the onset of the realization of her fully independent and artistic identity. Having anticipated increasing aggression from the Third Reich, Rahon along with her husband Wolfgang Paalen, fled Europe traveling to Alaska and British Columbia before permanently settling in their new adopted home—a safe haven for an increasing wave of European émigré artists. More importantly, Mexico served as a supportive space for women both in the commercial and artistic realms: offering a systematic network of art galleries run and shaped by women, among them Galería de Arte Mexicano founded and directed by sisters Carolina and Inés Amor, the country provided a creative source of inspiration with its magical landscape and native cultures. Consequently, the women surrealists developed a distinct artistic language that broke from the gender confines previously imposed by Breton’s-brand of surrealism. “Men do not appear with frequency in the women’s worlds […and] issues of identity dominate and consequently, portraits of themselves, friends, lovers and women in general figure prominently in their art— in using themselves to depict their “inner lives, hopes, dreams, and nightmares”, Alice Rahon and her artistic peers Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo among others, definitively distinguished “their surrealism from the men’s.” (Ilene Susan Fort, “In the Land of Reinvention”, ibid , pp. 41-2).

Manifest in Self-Portrait (Autorretrato) is a wealth of inspirational, hybrid sources that ultimately result in a highly sophisticated representation of the self re-imagined. Both her face and body, traditional markers of physical identity and sexualization, are effectively disguised by a mask of heavy white make-up and an intricately patterned cloak. Crowned with a halo of the sun, moon, stars, and mountain peaks, Rahon evokes the Hindu goddess Devi and the Aztec goddess Chicomecoatl. Both mother goddesses of their respective traditions, they represent the interrelationships between humans and nature.

Alice Rahon traveled to India in 1937 with fellow Surrealist Valentine Penrose, where she visited Almora, Jangeshwar and Dunagiri. She was greatly impressed by these sites, and even more so by the temples dedicated to Devi—the Great Goddess known as a fierce warrior capable of the destruction and creation while also embodying all aspects of womanhood and femininity. Further , the prismatic block-form construction of the overall composition and color-tonalities recall those of Indian miniature paintings with their fragments of saturated colors in which figures and forms ‘float’. (see Fig 2.) Likewise, the Aztec goddess Chicomecoatl —known as the goddess of maize—was considered an agent of fertility. (see Fig 3.) More, the mountain peaks crowning Rahon’s head directly reference the majestically peaked, ceremonial headdress associated with Chicomecoatl—often constructed of paper in emulation of the front of a temple, and would have been decorated with coloured paper streamers, knots, and rosettes. The Aztec idea of divine power held that power rested not in the body, but in cost.mes and regalia, and 'the body was merely the support for those objects in which the power was thought to reside' (Pasztory in Boone, Falsifications and Misreconstructions in Pre-Columbian Art, 1982, p. 85). Rahon’s metamorphosis to the ultimate lifeforce allows her to both consolidate and reclaim power over her own identity, escaping the restrictive definition of the femme-enfant and instead renewing herself as a transcendent and independent being of her choosing.

Alice Rahon

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