Nusch, the silent muse of surrealism

Nusch. A “aerial creature” under the brushes of Picasso, a fetishized body under the eye of Man Ray, “a twilight beauty” under the pen of Éluard. The Franco-German muse was one of the women most represented by the surrealist avant-garde. And yet, what do we really know about her? Nusch left no writing. She was, like many other muses of that time, a “voiceless body”as Joana Maso writes in her fascinating Nusch Éluard. Or, “how can we name the omnipresence of women judged without work in images that ended up finding a place on the art market?” It is on this paradox that the author decided to focus and retrace the course of Nusch's life using different archival funds.

First observation: surrealism “approached women as bodies without a socio-historical situation, enclosing them in discourses and fantasies, outside of time and space”. In doing so, “surrealism created its own archives”. What…