The Surrealism Website
Jane Graverol (1909-1984)


Jane Graverol was the daughter of the Symbolist illustrator and writer Alexandre Graverol. After studying at the Academies of Fine Arts of Etterbeek, she attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where she studied under Montald Constant and Jean Delville. She initially made her name in the field of still life and landscape and had her first solo exhibition in 1927, but in the late 1930s she started painting in the surrealist style. In 1949, after writing to René Magritte, she met members of the Belgian Surrealist group and in 1953 helped to found in Verviers the Temps Mêlés group which had leanings toward pataphysics - the absurdist, pseudo-scientific, literary invention of the French writer Alfred Jarry. She was a co-founder of two significant surrealist publications - the Temps Mêlés, and in 1954 along with Mariën and Paul Nougé, the avant-garde review Les Lèvres Nues. In the 1960s, she made the acquaintance of André Breton, and later Marcel Duchamp in New York. Even though she subsequently moved to France, she stayed in close contact with the Belgian surrealist artists and exhibited in Belgium every year.