Dallas Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology
and the 
Dallas Museum of Art

Present

SALOMON GRIMBERG, M.D.

"Jacqueline Lamba: A Female Surrealist" - Lecture

(Click for Full View)

Artist Jacqueline Lamba, "Behind the Sun"
(Gabrius 20th)

Sunday
October 21, 2001
5:00 p.m.

Dallas Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology and the Dallas Museum of Art present Salomon Grimberg, M.D., noted psychiatrist, art critic, and author, in a scholarly presentation with slide illustration about the French artist, Jacqueline Lamba, on Sunday, October 21, at 5:00 p.m., in the Horchow Auditorium of the Dallas Museum of Art. 

Jacqueline Lamba (1910-1993) is best known in artistic circles for her participation in the Surrealist Movement between 1934-1947. At the time of her death, over 400 works spanning 60 years were found in her Paris studio. These works convey an obsession with the rhythm of nature. In 1962, after an epiphany, Lamba established her personal style, expressing the need that had motivated her choices in life, the desire to fuse with another person, believing that otherwise she could not be complete. As she was giving up the idea of merging with a person, she felt she was able to do it with God, through nature.

Lamba was born in a Paris suburb, a disappointment to her parents who wanted a boy. They referred to her as 'he' and called her 'Jacko'. Her father died when she was four and her mother when she was seventeen. She reared herself thereafter.

Lamba married Andre Breton, the French Surrealist Movement's leader, and stayed with him for some ten years. During that time, Lamba made art and participated in all surrealist activities. She did, however, develop a growing sense of frustration when it became clear that Breton was more interested in her other roles as muse, ornament, lover, maid, cook, and mother. Lamba's mantra became that she had been a painter before, during, and after Breton, so why was she addressed only as his wife? Lamba was striking and when Breton wrote Mad Love about their meeting and affair, he described her as "scandalously beautiful". Beauty was a double-edged sword, however. She would not be taken seriously despite obvious talent and developed intellect. 

During the years with Breton, Lamba befriended everyone in the Surrealist group and those on its periphery. She posed for many including Picasso, Lam, Masson, Man Ray, Dora Maar, and Rogi Andre. Her marriage with Breton was, however, at a dead end. In 1941, they escaped to the U.S. as Hitler looked for surrealists for his concentration camps, viewing them as subversive. In the U.S., Lamba met American sculptor, David Hare, for whom she left Breton, lived with him for ten years, and then returned to France where she gradually became a recluse, only to paint. 

Dr. Grimberg's talk will explore Lamba's life and sources of her creativity, and will be accompanied by many slides of her work, of Breton's's and of those of their circle, photographs of her and of the main figures in her life, and will lay out her development as person and as painter. Dr. Grimberg's scholarship about Lamba unearthed her importance as a painter. He demonstrated her great talent in his important exhibition of her work, opening this summer in Santiago de Compostela at the Fundacion Eugenio Granell. This exhibition then traveled to the Krasner Pollock House in East Hampton, the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, California, and will open at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida on November 8. It returns to France in February.

For further information about Dr. Grimberg's October 21 presentation, please contact: