Living Paint: Tempera and Knowledge in the Surrealist Art of Leonora Carrington, Sylvia Fein, and Gerrie Gutmann

My doctoral dissertation investigates the concept of living paint in the tempera painting practice of three surrealist artists working in Mexico and the United States during and after World War II: the British-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011), and the American artists Sylvia Fein (1919–2024) and Gerrie Gutmann (1921–69). The idea of living paint, introduced by Fein in 1943, captures their critical engagement with matter and the materiality of bodies, which they conceived of not—like in the Western metaphysical tradition—as inert and passive, but as living, thinking, and animate. Drawing on new archival material and artworks, I investigate how their tempera paint is both alive and actively means. To this end, I consider how the material contributes to the artwork’s meaning and further introduce principles from new materialisms and specific Indigenous belief systems encountered by the artists which challenge the idea of materials as simply passively inscribable with external cultural meaning. I propose that the artists’ tempera practices constituted embodied and artisanal modes of meaning production and epistemological inquiry—cultivating an experiential knowledge of the life of paint and other matter. Across the three case studies, I present individual but linked frameworks for each artist, discussing their tempera work through this shared sense of the life and meaning of paint but focusing on themes that relate to their respective interests, notably occultism, animism, and abjection. Chapter One formulates a material meaning for tempera specific to Leonora Carrington’s occult-feminist paradigm, touching on its magical efficacy and her definition of matter as “thinking substance.” In Chapter Two, I investigate tempera’s role in Sylvia Fein’s exploration of the life of matter in her modern animist mythopoeia which through paint imagines life, personhood, and corporeality beyond the category of the human. Chapter Three on Gerrie Gutmann traces her use of abject paint and casein’s material-symbolic relationship with milk and the maternal as central to her play with bodies’ leaky materiality, where bodily boundaries and those between artwork and viewer are disrupted. When drawn together, the case studies recover the three artists’ materially engaged tempera practice as overlooked site of surrealist wartime and postwar inquiry into the nature of things and of being and its project of elaborating alternatives to dominant Enlightenment traditions and rationalism, in turning to alternative forms of knowledge. The artists’ challenging of established dualisms brought a material feminist perspective to the surrealists’ reconfiguring of the human and humankind’s relation to the nonhuman and physical and metaphysical environments in an expansion of Surrealism’s politics during and around World War II that resonates with contemporary theory and concerns.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Bremm, Helen

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mahon, Alyce

• Tempera
• Surrealism
• Embodied Knowledge
• Surrealist Painting
• Mexico
• United States

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/06c6aad1-d88c-4449-ad67-c561604e3cbd/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.122283

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/390953