About her painting In Spite of Everything, Spring, Jacqueline Lamba wrote: “The object is only a part of space created by light. Color is its non-arbitrary choice in transfiguration. Texture is the crystallization of this choice. The line does not exist; it is already form. Shadow does not exist; it is already light.”
Light makes things visible, but too much light can blind. Jacqueline Lamba (1910–1993) died with the belief that “she would not be recognized as an artist because she was a woman, had been married to André Breton, had stopped painting Surrealism, and had a difficult personality.” Why such a bleak view from someone who had lived obsessed with light?
Born in Saint-Mandé, a suburb of Paris, Jacqueline Mathilde Lamba was the younger of two girls from the marriage of Jane Pinon and José Lamba. Her birth was an open disappointment to her parents, who wanted a boy they planned to name . That did not deter them. Legally, they named their daughter but referred to her as —and used “he” when speaking about her. When she entered adolescence, despite blossoming into
