Androgyny and Surrealism Regarding Frida and Ismael – Old Myths: Eternal Feminine

Abstract

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the myth of the Androgyne returns as a promise of spiritual happiness. Among the Surrealists, the androgyny, along with the cult of the woman, worked as alterity, as appreciation of underground modernity. Androgyny appears in several works of Frida Kahlo in Mexico and in Ismael Nery, in Brazil, both with a surrealistic approach. In Frida, the myth oscillates between spiritual and political, between transgression and subjection, going to the lesbianism and the desire to invert the traditional gender roles to the dissolution of her own identity, submitted in love by her husband. In Ismael, the duplicity of his selfportraits and iconography of loving couples expresses the fusion of the sexes as part of the world of ideas. “Artistic sex par excellence,” the myths appear more strongly in the art of Ismael Nery.