It was hard to stay devoted to poetry, however, living in London at the height of the Luftwaffe’s near-constant bombardment in 1940-41. It was a desire, as the author writes of one of her key characters, Valentine Penrose, “to live the mystical essence of life rather than its mundane details.” Nowhere is that more apparent than in the work of the Surrealists, for whom a dream or a nightmare was depicted as more real than the day-to-day. Chadwick makes clear that the two are one. Too many art books read as though the person who created the work is superfluous to the art most biographies ultimately fail to show the connection of the creator to the creation. It is a book particularly suited to this moment of re-evaluation of the contributions of women in myriad fields.

The book tells the essential story of 10 women, each of whom made her way out of the shadows of famous men of Surrealist art, stepping down from the muse’s pedestal to claim her own identity. It’s that Chadwick had the patience to re-examine them all, and the insight to recognize a different story than had yet been told of life and art in the years before and during the Second World War. It’s not that the events and their participants will be any different, of course. San Francisco author and noted scholar Whitney Chadwick’s “Farewell to the Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism” is the kind of book that will change the history of art.

Whitney chadwick surrealism