Mary Wykeham: The Surrealist Who Embraced A Religious Life And Became A Nun
This year marks the centenary of the Surrealist Manifesto, a pivotal text authored by the French writer and poet André Breton that kickstarted one of the 20th century’s most radical art movements. Breton and his fellow Surrealists, including artists Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte and Leonora Carrington, looked to the subconscious for inspiration, embracing dreams, irrationality and the absurd.
Across this past year and in 2025, the advent of Surrealism is being celebrated by several major exhibitions in Europe and the U.S., including "Imagine! 100 Years of Surrealism,” "Long Live Surrealism! 1924–Today” and "Forbidden Territories: 100 years of Surreal Landscapes.” While each one features artworks by the movement’s most celebrated artists, the latter at The Hepworth Wakefield in the U.K. includes a special focus on a remarkable yet largely forgotten figure: The English artist Mary Wykeham (1909–96).
Wykeham’s story is told by Silvano Levy in his meticulously researched book “Mary Wykeham: Surrealist out of the Shadows,” from which emerges a compelling portrait of a talented yet conflicted artist wrestling to reconcile her commitment to art with a religious calling.
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Born to a well-to-do family on the Isle of Wight in southern England, Wykeham grew up intent on pursuing a career as an artist, despite her father’s disapproval. Her journey took her to London and then Europe, where she found success as a painter and printmaker. Along the way, she worked as a nurse, embraced and rejected Communism, helped Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, worked as a war artist, explored Taoism and published poetry, only to reject it all and become a nun.
Wykeham attended her local Anglican church regularly as a child.
“Religion was an accepted part of life,” she recalled in her memoirs.
She later stopped believing in a caring God and dismissed the Bible as a book of myths, putting her faith instead in politics, which she believed was a more realistic means by which to achieve “a fairer and classless world, without war.”
In 1936, she visited the influential “International Surrealist Exhibition” at London’s Burlington Galleries, which introduced her to the work of the European Surrealists. Impressed by what she saw, she was stirred by their stated desire to change the received social and political order through the altering of consciousness.
In pursuit of the radical and unconventional, she travelled to Paris where she attended Atelier 17, the avant-garde print studio established by Stanley William Hayter which was frequented by many Surrealists, including Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró.
Under Hayter’s tutelage Wykeham learned the art of burin engraving and experimented with automatic Surrealist techniques, creating semi-abstract works characterised by undulating and coiling lines.
“Detail from Dream — Desert,” (1979) by Mary Wykeham (Photo courtesy of The Hepworth Wakefield)
The first work she made there was “Wind Figures” (1937), a complex composition of twisting and curling shapes inspired by smoke rising from a cigarette but which suggested to her the dynamic energy of wind, water or dancers. The picture, which she counted among her favorites, is displayed at The Hepworth Wakefield alongside similar pieces from across her career.
During the war, she exhibited prominently in London and in 1946 participated in several Paris exhibitions, showing increasingly abstract works exploring the subconscious.
In 1947, her father shockingly took his own life, an event that had a profound affect on her. In her grief, she was drawn to “The Secret of the Golden Flower,” a 17th-century book on Chinese Taoist meditation which inspired a portfolio of engravings.
While her engagement with Taoism put her at odds with the Surrealists, who were antagonistic towards any form of spiritual belief, the eight engravings (which are displayed in Wakefield) are among her most mesmerising works. Characterised by twisting, sinuous lines, they convey, Levy wrote, a dynamic “sense of energy – centrifugal and centripetal forces, spinning planes, spring-like tautening, rotation, contraction, expansion, stretching, swirling, vortices.”
In 1949, with works on show simultaneously in Paris and London (alongside those of Picasso, Magritte, Arp, Ernst and Klee), Wykeham’s career was in the ascendent — yet her heart was elsewhere and she left for Italy on a spiritual search, looking for truth and meaning.
In Florence, she had encountered devotional frescoes by Fra Angelico at San Marco and was moved by Verrocchio’s bronze sculpture of Christ and Saint Thomas on the exterior of the Orsanmichel. In Assisi, she saw frescoes by Giotto and Cimabue in the Basilica of Saint Francis, which caused her to ponder whether she too might pursue a life of poverty. She also spent time in Sicily, which inspired a number of semi-abstract, dreamlike landscape paintings, several of which can be seen in Wakefield.
Despite her misgivings about the Catholic Church, Wykeham felt increasingly drawn to the faith, noting that she had “a duty to the next generation to find out whether Catholicism was valid”. Back in London, she sought the counsel of Father John Heenan and decided to become a nun.
Her decision shocked her friends and family who dismissed her religious devotion as a fad.
“It was the end of life as a painter and the beginning of something quite new,” she recalled.
In the early 1950s, she explored the various orders she could join, eventually choosing the Little Sisters of Jesus near Aix-en-Provence in France. In 1952, she became Little Sister Mary and helped establish the order’s first English fraternity in London.
Although Heenan had recommended giving up art altogether, Little Sister Magdeleine of the Little Sisters encouraged her to use her talents in service of the church and she devoted much of her time to making liturgical art for chapels and oratories, including drawings, clay statuettes, small monstrances in copper and crucifixes cast in metal. She also made stained-glass windows.
However, she refused to compromise her own style and continued experimenting with pictorial reductionism, as seen in a stained glass window from 1955 depicting St Lucy of Syracuse, which, devoid of perspective, echoes Wykeham’s flat, semi-abstract figures of the 1940s.
She took her final vows in September 1960 in Rome and was posted to India, to Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges where she assisted and also sketched Tibetan refugees fleeing the Chinese invasion. When her visa was not renewed, she returned to London where the fraternity house needed to be vacated.
It was during the move to a new fraternity house in 1964 that the great stash of artworks from her former studio that had been hidden in the workshop for some 15 years was discovered. “It was the work of half a lifetime, an expression of times, places, people and inner things that progressed through influences and schools, surrealism, abstraction, to a more personal style,” she wrote. The nuns ordered her to dispose of the work, arguing that it was “not the style of the fraternity.”
She agonized over her dilemma and in the end gave away many pictures, burning the rest or tossing them into the garbage or the River Thames.
“I felt bereft, as if I had lost half of myself, as if I had lost a child,” she recalled.
It would be two decades before she resumed her creative activities, gradually returning to art in 1984 after many years living in solitude as a hermit. However, her failing eyesight prevented her from making much progress.
In 1990, at the age of 81, she underwent cataract surgery. With her eyesight restored she enthusiastically set about producing dynamic prints and paintings. Among these is the lino print “The Burning Bush” (1990), an intense fiery red and yellow conflagration evidently inspired by the events of Exodus 3.
By the end of 1994, her eyesight was again failing her. Despite being almost blind, she was able to produce “Before Dawn” (1994), an etching depicting the fragmented interior of a convent. The architecture, far from appearing solid, seems to be disintegrating; the building’s ceiling ostensibly open to the elements while a procession of nuns move through an arched passageway towards a bright white light.
Despite this new lease of creativity, Wykeham never regained her footing in the art world, and it is only in recent years that her legacy has begun to be re-evaluated.
“How can surrealism have been a path to Catholicism? Part of the failure of the movement was that it tried to force the unconscious to yield up spiritual secrets that are in fact gifts of God, and unobtainable by human effort,” she asked later in life.
For her, the Surrealists’ anti-religious declarations became a catalyst — prompting her to seek beyond their explorations of the subconscious to find “a metaphysical basis for a sound mysticism based on doctrine.”
Surrealism, in a very real sense, opened a path to a “spiritual dimension,” which ultimately led to Wykeham finding a “new meaning” to her life. Despite walking away from the trappings of a successful art career, she never abandoned her creative impulses.
“Forbidden Territories: 100 years of Surreal Landscapes” is on view at The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, through April 21. Visit The Hepworth Wakefield website for more information.
David Trigg is a writer and art historian based in the U.K. He is the author of “Money in Art” (HENI). You can find him on Instagram @davidtriggwriter.