Surrealism was once the idiom of proto-feminist art. That counterintuitive fact centers LACMA’s “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women in Mexico and the United States.” Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a wild ride.

From a box office perspective, “In Wonderland” can be divided into Frida and Everybody Else. Among the half dozen or so Frida Kahlo paintings are Self-Portrait With Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird and The Two Fridas. Cult-of-Frida-wise, it doesn’t get better than those two.

Fortunately, this show (curated by LACMA’s Ilene Susan Fort and the Musée de Arte Moderno’s Tere Arcq) is not built around the box office. It’s a serious, curious exploration of artists who are mostly half-familiar or not familiar at all. Consider Dorr Bothwell’s Hollywood Success (top of post). What’s with the flesh-colored body stocking on a nude? The metallic colors grate like fingernails on a chalkboard.

The trans-Atlantic version of surrealism was always a little different. It could be argued that many Americans didn’t “get” surrealism in the French sense. They copied the part that was easy to copy—you know, weird stuff, like in a dream—and disregarded the nuances. Breton and company would have frowned at Bothwell’s satirical title, and at the very idea of humor in a surrealist painting. Bothwell, who travelled the globe, worked mainly in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Those were remote outposts of the avant garde in 1940.

The Bothwell is far from the best work in the show, but it’s one of many you’ll have a hard time forgetting. The standouts, aside from Kahlo, are painters Leonora Carrington, Dorothy Tanning, and Remedios Varo. Carrington may be  the best for her luscious, Italianate colors and the many, many breasts she paints on every My Little Pony and Liger (Below, Green Tea, 1942).

Only toward the end does “In Wonderland” begin to behave, by conventional standards. There is a trio of phallic Louis Bourgeois sculptures, and the last two rooms venture further into abstraction and early feminism, with a Louise Nevelson Sky Cathedral and a small, scintillating 1947 Lee Krasner. It was made the year of her husband’s first drip paintings, and it’s no less forward-looking.

Susan Sontag wrote that surrealism was the primary mode of modern photography. Of the LACMA exhibition’s many photographs, none can be more powerful than Lee Miller’s paired shots of an amputated breast from a radical mastectomy. Miller got a job as staff photographer at the Sorbonne medical school. About 1930, she managed to smuggle a breast out by putting it on a dinner plate and covering it with a cloth. She photographed it on a plate with cutlery and a place mat. In unflinching f/64 B&W, the image transcends Gericault and Gauguin. It looks like a slice of cherry pie from Twin Peaks.

The breast fetish was a standard of male surrealism. Miller’s onetime boyfriend, Man Ray, did photos of her breasts. Never shown in the artist’s lifetime, Miller’s two contact prints of the severed breast were discovered after her death. Admire it or shudder: How many contemporary artists have Miller’s cojones?

Tags: Dorr Bothwell, Frida Kahlo, LACMA, Lee Krasner, Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington