Surrealist Composition with Mermaid, 1940

Aline Gagnaire's Surrealist Composition with Mermaid (1940) is a relatively little-known but intriguing work from the period when she was active in the Parisian surrealist underground during the German occupation of France.

Gagnaire belonged to the generation of French surrealists who continued working after many leading figures, including André Breton, had left France. Her work often combined poetic invention, dream imagery, and unconventional materials, and although detailed scholarly commentary on this specific painting is scarce, the mermaid is a highly resonant surrealist symbol. In surrealist art, hybrid beings—part human, part animal or mythological creature—often represented the unconscious, metamorphosis, desire, fantasy and the feminine.

A mermaid would have fit naturally within the surrealist fascination with transformation and the blurring of boundaries between the real and the imaginary. Given the painting's title, the mermaid was likely intended less as a narrative figure and more as a symbolic presence within a dreamlike composition. Today, Gagnaire is recognised as an important but underappreciated figure in French surrealism. Her participation in avant-garde groups, later exhibitions—including the Venice Biennale—and the growing scholarly interest in women surrealists have increased attention to her work. Surrealist Composition with Mermaid is especially interesting because it comes from her early surrealist period, before many of her later experiments with texture, assemblage, and mixed-media forms.