'The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods': A Surrealist Awakening (Article)

In this article, published in the Scottish Society for Art History Newsletter, I describe the methodology and critical context underpinning a series of paintings that deploy surrealist methods of painting/collage in response to a story by Charles Perrault. Perrault’s ‘La Belle au Bois Dornant’ is a text which played a key role in the (imperfect) historical process of ‘civilising’ fairy tales. According to the Marxist folklorist Jack Zipes, the bourgeois appropriation of fairy tales (undertaken by writers such as Perrault, from the late 17th century onwards) sublimated their erotic and political content (their latent ‘revolutionary’ fantasies). In this article I explore what configurations of image/ text occur when a method of surrealist collage is used to illustrate Perrault’s tale, referring to Max Ernst's collage novels and their emphasis of he psychological / political content of found images.