In the December 1929 issue of the surrealist review La Révolution surréaliste, leading member of the movement Rene Magritte published a piece critiquing the attitudes of his fellow male surrealists towards women. Magritte depicts a painting of a woman with the text “I do not see the woman hidden in the forest” [translated from French], surrounded by photographs of leading male surrealists with their eyes closed (Ades 41). Surrealism as a movement sought inspiration in the unconscious, psychic realm within the human mind, and one of their primary “guides” or muses to the unconscious realm was the idea of the woman. Notably, Magritte here seems to critique the shortfalls of this approach. The woman in the center, as opposed to the men around her, is an artistic representation of an ideal woman rather than a photographed human being—and even then, the surrealists do not truly see her. Women, to the surrealists, were tools and not human beings. Their individuality was irrelevant in their role as a guide to the subconscious. As Dawn Ades notes in the Oxford Art Journal notes, “All specific reference is eliminated, and the woman, ‘the collective person of the woman”, as Breton described her in Les vases communicants, is now presented as the guide to the unconscious, the incarnation of the marvelous, symbol of the psychic life,” (Ades 41).

Ades, Dawn. “Notes on Two Women Surrealist Painters: Eileen Agar and Ithell Colquhoun.” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 3, no. 1, 1980, pp. 36–42. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360177. Accessed 19 Mar. 2023.

Magritte, Rene. I Do Not See the [Woman] Hidden in the Forest. La Révolution surréaliste, 15 Dec. 1929, p. 73.