JACQUELINE LAMBA

Saint-Mandé, France, 1910 — Rochecorbon, France, 1993

Born in the Paris suburb of Saint-Mandé on November 17, 1910, Jacqueline Lamba was a painter whose career spanned six decades, evolving across Surrealism, expressionist landscape, and deeply personal late abstraction. Orphaned by adolescence — her father died in a car accident in 1914, her mother of tuberculosis in 1927 — she enrolled at the École de l'Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, supported herself through design work and, briefly, as a nude underwater dancer at the Coliseum in Pigalle, and sought out André Breton after reading his writing. They married in 1934, and their daughter, Aube Solange, was born in 1935.

Throughout the 1930s she participated in major Surrealist exhibitions, though her work was frequently displayed without credit, subsumed under the designation "wife of." In 1938 she traveled to Mexico with Breton, where she and Frida Kahlo met for the first time and formed a lasting friendship — two painters made peripheral within movements that celebrated them as muses while ignoring them as makers. Fleeing Nazi-occupied France with Breton and young Aube, the family crossed the Pyrenees with the aid of Varian Fry's Emergency Rescue Committee before eventually arriving in New York in 1941 under Peggy Guggenheim's patronage. There, Lamba exhibited her work at the inaugural show of the Art of This Century gallery and was included in both of Guggenheim's landmark all-women exhibitions: Exhibition by 31 Women (1943) and The Women (1945). Having separated from Breton in 1943, she held her first solo exhibition at the Norlyst Gallery in 1944, at which her catalogue statement declared: "From the onset, women stand no chance in life." 

Lamba married the American sculptor David Hare in 1946; after his infidelities she ended that marriage in 1954, she returned to France, destroyed much of her earlier work, and resolved to paint only for herself — a period she later described as finally painting "in the manner of her own creative impulse." In 1967 the Musée Picasso in Antibes mounted the most comprehensive exhibition of her work in her lifetime. Recent retrospectives — including Jacqueline Lamba: Painter at Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco (2023), and the touring 31 Mujeres at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2024–25), and 31 Mulheres at MAC/CCB, Lisbon (2025) — have firmly established her place within the Surrealist canon.

Work by Jacqueline Lamba is maintained as part of the 31 Women Collection to preserve the legacy of the first all-women's exhibition in the United States on record and to maintain Lamba's contributions in the record of art history.