My novel Swimming with Tigers contains many descriptions of surrealist artworks, mainly from the 1930s. Some appear exactly as they are and some I have altered and adapted for my own narrative uses. Many are made by characters in the book, while others are experienced by them as an alternative reality.
Artworks made by the characters
In the book, Penelope makes Oppenheim’s notorious fur-covered cup and saucer. This is such an iconic piece of art that writing the scene in which she actually sticks the gazelle fur onto a cup felt like a deliciously wicked thing to do. It also led me to investigate the materiality of the work more closely because, rather like the artist herself, I had to figure out how, practically, one could get fur to adhere to a china teacup. After doing some research into the types of glue available in the 1930s, I eventually decided my character would use hide glue, which has to be heated in order to be used and rewrote the scene accordingly. Oppenheim’s title for her arresting creation was simply Object. In a transgressive act, she turned a domestic item into a fetishist object, challenging restrictive definitions of femininity. However, when it was exhibited, Breton gave it the title Le Déjeuner en Fourrure (Luncheon in Fur) in a deliberate allusion to Edouard Manet’s painting of 1863 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass). In Manet’s well-known painting, set in the countryside, a naked woman is surrounded by fully-clothed men in a coded reference to prostitution in the Bois de Boulogne just outside Paris, and as part of a tradition in fine art painting in which women’s bodies are shown as sexually available and allied to nature.
In my novel, the fur cup is given a title by the leader of the surrealist group. He calls it From One Hand to Another. I chose this title as a subtle nod to the exchange of women as objects between men in the depiction and purchase of artworks but it also refers to the difficult personal situation Penelope finds herself in. It would be giving away too much to describe what impact this experience of having her art named and appropriated has on my fictional woman artist, but suffice it to say that she does not tolerate this level of control for long.
Penelope also creates a version of Leonora Carrington’s Self-Portrait: Inn of the Dawn Horse throughout the novel and its iconography symbolises her progress from creative play and permissiveness into the need for escape. I changed the small animal in the picture from a hyena into a cat because of an encounter with a feral cat that Penelope has at a crucial juncture in the story.
Yet another real work of art that is made by my character Penelope is Eileen Agar’s Angel of Anarchy, a life-sized head swathed in fabric and feathers. In the book, it is an expression of Penelope’s frustration at the elusiveness of the other main character, Suzanne. The sculpture also represents a story that Suzanne has told her about seeing her mother’s dead body. Unlike the original artwork, which was created with a plaster cast, my version of Angel of Anarchy is made from the snapped-off head of a shop mannequin. After researching the possible construction of this fictitious artwork, I was careful to describe the head as being lightweight because fashion mannequins in the 30s were made of papier-mâché.
Meret Oppenheim’s My Nurse makes an appearance in the novel, once again made by Penelope and constructed from another woman’s cast-off shoes. The roasting tin is one that Penelope finds in the kitchen and has been recently used.
Finally, Penelope paints a version of Ithell Colquhoun’s Scylla, getting her inspiration from lying in the bath and looking at her legs, as did Colquhoun.
Artworks used differently
Some surrealist artworks are used more tangentially and are enacted or experienced directly by a character, usually Suzanne, who is the embodiment of the surrealist way of seeing in the book. For instance, Suzanne stands outside of a shop which has butterflies pinned on boards and her particular cast of mind, which is very strange, produces a sort of hallucination in which the butterflies are on her face, as in Roland Penrose’s Winged Domino.
At one point, Suzanne experiences her reflection in a mirror in much the same way as in this self-portrait by Claude Cahun. 
Being alienated from, and haunted by, one’s own image is something Suzanne knows well and, as a character, she is haunted by the vivid description of the figure of Nadja in Breton’s book of that name.
An even more tangential inclusion of surrealist art is a moment in the story when Suzanne remembers the sexual abuse she has suffered in the past. I also took some details, including the leather straps, from Leonora Carrington’s traumatic experience in a clinic in Santander that is described in her written account Down Under. In my novel, Suzanne has a vision of her body as the metal figure of Woman With Her Throat Cut by Giacometti.
Here’s an extract:
Carefully, she allowed herself to remember that terrible time when she was bound to a bed and her whole body arched away from that man’s invading hands, and his sharp fingers that could tear up her insides like a vulture’s beak. In the same way as she used to then, she made her body hard. She threw back her head so that her neck extended into the segments of an insect’s exoskeleton and her limbs became dry pods. Finally, every part of her was as hard and compacted as a muscle in spasm. One hand, connected to her arm by a rivet of steel, stiffened into a blunt, ovoid paddle.
A gallery for Swimming with Tigers
Dozens more surrealist artworks appear in the novel and at some point I will dedicate a page on this website to displaying them all. I want to reassure prospective readers that it is perfectly possible to enjoy the novel without knowing anything about surrealism or having seen any of the paintings, photographs and objects I have included, but I think it will enhance the experience of reading if you do know the originals.
For over a year now, I have been writing on Substack and my newsletter is called The Fur Cup. Each post is an imaginary encounter with a surrealist work of art. The newsletter is free and you can choose to have it emailed to you as well as being able to look at it on my Substack page.
I began by having the fur cup itself speak and have played around with imagining spectators discussing surrealist paintings in a gallery or having the works come to life and ponder on their existence and meaning. My aim is to make surrealist art accessible and fun, just as it was when I was writing my novel.
You can read The Fur Cup, and sign up to get my posts via email, here.