Mimi PARENT — incorrigibly wild and absolute force in Surrealism
Disclaimer: The information provided in this episode comes from multiple sources and is not my scientific studies or discoveries. Check the references for more details. Thank you!
Welcome to HerArt podcast, a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. In this episode, we will talk about Mimi PARENT, described by André Breton, leader of the Surrealist movement, as one of the “vital forces” of Surrealism. My name is Nata Andreev and I am going to tell you seven curious facts that you didn’t know about a vivacious lady with a wicked sense of humor, whose passion for life and art inspired everything and everyone she touched. It will be amazing if you could join me for the fourth session of my project with the National Art Museum, this Sunday, November 25th. We will discuss art in ancient Egypt.
Curious Fact #1
Mimi the eighth of nine children of the architect Lucien Parent. From 1942 to 1947 she studied with Alfred Pellan, where she met the artist Jean Benoît, her future husband. Together with Pellan and Benoît, Parent formed the short-lived Prisme d’Yeux, calling for the liberation of art. This rebellious, avant-garde attitude led to her expulsion from art school and lay behind all of her art and life.
Curious Fact #2
The period from 1944 to 1959, during the term of Maurice Duplessis as premier of Quebec, was known as the Grande Noirceur (“Great Darkness”) and was Canada’s “McCarthy” era, characterized by extreme conservatism from government and from the Catholic Church. Probably as a result of this conservatism, Parent was expelled in 1947 for “insubordination”, related to the staging of an exhibition at the school.
Curious Fact #3
“Masculine-feminine”, a tie made of Parent’s own long, luxurious mane, set against a man’s suit lapels and crisp white shirt, parodied bourgeois dress codes and evoked the erotic texture of hair. Together with the three-dimensional tableaux boxes for which she is best known, it was the high point of her involvement with the surrealists in the decades after the second world war.
Curious Fact #4
Her first one-person show, which was praised by Time magazine, was held at the Dominion Gallery in Montreal in 1947. Whilst in Montreal she took part in evenings of playing cadavres exquis, a favorite Surrealist pastime in which several artists would work together on a picture, without knowing what the others had already drawn.
Curious Fact #5
The whip itself is both a simplified representation of the female body in motion in space — see how, rather delightfully causally, it seems to lean back into the wind as it walks — and nothing but a whip, formed from the braids of the artist’s own blonde hair (which may comprehend head and hair), with that columnar torso providing us with a visual sketch of all the rest. (There is an interesting biographical detail to be inserted here: this artwork was created, these braids sheared off in preparation because the artist discovered that her partner had been cheating on her). The whip feels both lights, loose and sexually teasing, and savage in intent. These braids are also reminiscent of a stag’s antlers, poised to strike. They are touching, too. The whip feels terribly vulnerable, even child-like. Braids more usually define childhood. They also gave Rapunzel, once let down, her freedom. It is perhaps the child in the woman lashing back who has been wronged then.
Curious Fact #6
Her innovative use of found objects to create exquisite sculptural boxes displaying mythological tableaux, and her subversive approach to the themes of sexual desire and gender politics, were vital to the evolution of Surrealism and to the increasingly important role women played within it.
Curious Fact #7
Parent introduced an important theatrical element to surrealist art with the three-dimensional tableaux boxes she began to make in 1959. These were boxes lined in black, with glass fronts, containing arrangements of objects discovered in flea markets, such as little dolls and toy animals, which Parent painted, dressed and set against plaster sculpted landscapes, to present dramatic scenes from mythology, folklore, and her own imagination.
Thank you so much for listening to the ninth episode of HerArt podcast — a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. If you want to follow more of what we do, find us on Facebook and Instagram. And don’t forget to tune in next month, for our last episode in season one, when I am going to tell you about Diane ARBUS — a child with a live grenade. It will be amazing if you could join me for the fourth session of my project with the National Art Museum, this Sunday, November 25th. We will discuss art in ancient Egypt.
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