Hélène Vanel

Hélène Vanel was a dancer, sculptor, and painter affiliated with the Surrealist movement of the 20th century. Not a great deal is known now of Vanel, though she was quite famous during her time.

Early life Vanel first arrived on the scene in 1921 when she joined the Margaret Morris Club, a school of dance in London. In 1923, Vanel, Morris, and Loïs Hutton began holding summer dance school in the town of Antibes in the French Riviera. Breton and Aragon served as an orderlies in WW1, and observed how the PTSD of soldiers (termed war hysteria) was not a result of weakness. Hysteria was viewed by many Surrealist artists as a subversion of the status quo. The performance drew great critique from attendees and Vanel's fellow surrealists.

Dali said of her performance

"She jetted from the wings like a tornado in an

unbelievable movement that induced a demential delirium

within all in attendance. She created a total uproar

with her violent entrance, lunging up onto the bed,

holding at arm's length a live rooster which cackled

in terror. She herself began screaming in hysterical

mimodrama as she rolled and contorted herself on

the bed. She jumped up and down before throwing

herself into the pond surrounded by reeds that we

had set up in the middle of the room. (Dali 1973, 233)"

Unfortunately, her historic part in the first Surrealist exposition did not garner the attention of many scholars.

Post Exposition Vanel went on to continue her dance school and company after the exposition. A rare quote of hers reads

"Dance, joyous and powerful expression of the enthusiasm for life, must have the same mission as poetry. It creates forms in time and space. Dance is the vertigo of matter...To recover the truth of being. To simultaneously acquire the sense of the invisible powers which attract us even while repelling us: Is this not a means of overcoming ourselves, of leaving behind marasmus and mediocrity, a method for attaining that magnificence that we have so shamefully abandoned."

She went on to become a painter, sculptor, and a lecturer at the Louvre.