Mimi Parent (1924–2005) played a key role in the international Surrealist movement. Trained at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal under Alfred Pellan, she developed an experimental practice that came fully into view during her years in Paris, at the heart of Surrealism’s postwar evolution. Her famed work Masculine/feminine—a tie made of Parent’s own long, luxurious mane, set against a man’s suit lapels—was chosen by André Breton for the poster of the 1959 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris. Despite this achievement, and the fact that Parent’s work has been exhibited internationally at museums including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Tate Modern, London, her legacy has been overlooked in Canadian art history.
In Mimi Parent: Life & Work, authors Maria Rosa Lehmann and Laurence Niro offer the first comprehensive study of the artist’s wide-ranging practice. Parent introduced an important theatrical element to Surrealist art in 1959 with her creation of the three-dimensional tableaux boxes in which she presented dramatic scenes from mythology, folklore, and her own imagination. Moving between painting, drawing, assemblage, and immersive environments, her work resists easy categorization. Her multimedia approach resulted in richly layered works that pushed the Surrealist movement in new formal directions.
“The history of Surrealism cannot be understood without Mimi Parent, whose work and actions positioned women not as symbols or muses, but as active collaborators and agents of poetic and political transformation.”Mara Rosa Lehmann and Laurence Niro
Lehmann and Niro situate Parent within the cultural contexts that shaped both her visibility within Surrealism and her marginalization in Canada. In doing so, the authors examine how she navigated gendered expectations in 1940s Quebec, sustained an independent artistic identity during her decades in France, and developed a deeply generative partnership with sculptor Jean Benoît. Parent emerges from this study as a key figure in twentieth-century art—an artist for whom imagination was not an escape from reality, but a disciplined, material practice of freedom.
About the Authors
Maria Rosa Lehmann is an art historian and computational researcher specializing in Surrealism, performance, and transnational avant-garde practices. She holds a PhD from Sorbonne University, Paris (2018) and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Cornell University, Ithaca, the Université du Québec à Montréal, and the German Forum for Art History, Paris. She is the author of Alfred Pellan: Life & Work (2023) and has contributed to major exhibitions at the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, and the Louvre, Paris. Alongside her art-historical research, she develops relational research databases and digital infrastructures for large-scale cultural data analysis. She is currently completing a BSc in Computer Science at FernUniversität in Hagen with a focus on relational database design and algorithmic modeling, applying computational methods across art-historical research and digital humanities.
Laurence Niro is a Montreal-based art historian whose research focuses on Surrealism, feminist art history, and the critical reassessment of women artists in twentieth-century Europe and North America. Her master’s thesis offered the first sustained scholarly study of Mimi Parent, addressing the artist’s marginalization within histories of Surrealism despite her central role in the movement.