A monster with five feet

Grace Pailthorpe (1883–1971) was a surgeon, psychoanalyst and Surrealist artist. In 1935 she met Reuben Mednikoff, an advertising artist 23 years her junior. They began a life-long collaboration in which they used Surrealist ‘automatic’ processes as methods of psychoanalytic experimentation. In this painting, Pailthorpe uses watercolour to create an abstract shape which she has worked up with ink based on the unconscious associations it triggered. Within the monstrous form, phallic images and breasts are visible. Babies and children’s toys have also been added with ink, reflecting the significance of childhood experience in Freudian psychoanalysis. This work was made in 1940, the year in which Pailthorpe and Mednikoff broke with the British Surrealist group and moved to North America to continue their research.