What unites them, perhaps, is their intuitive ear for the nonsensical: “ Love is not love / when it’s a coathanger,” she sings on “ Love Is Not Love”, a song from 2016 album Crab Day, conjuring an outlandish (and oddly perfect) image of love as an emotional crutch. Her five albums to date span darkly humorous folk, sing-song psychedelia and sui-generis post-punk, each one weirder and more assured than the last. “You would be angry, if all of a sudden when you’re in your late 70s people are going, ‘This is amazing!’ It’s like, ‘Yes, it always has been!’” 10 years into her career as a recording artist, Le Bon’s music seems to have reached a tipping point of its own. “I think I’d be angry,” says Le Bon, citing Dorothy Iannone as another favourite artist to receive belated recognition for her work. Nearly 100 years after André Breton published his surrealist manifesto, the movement’s women are, it would seem, finally emerging from the shadow of their male contemporaries (Tanning passed away in 2012, at the age of 101). She’s in good company: Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, and Leonor Fini are among the female surrealist painters to score major retrospectives over the past few years in 2018, Artsy declared that the market for these artists had reached a tipping point. Tanning, an American painter, sculptor, and poet known for her haunting scenes of absurdist horror and latent eroticism, has been enjoying renewed popularity of late. I’ve come to meet Le Bon, one of modern indie-rock’s more surreally inclined talents, on London’s South Bank for the Tate’s career-spanning exhibition on Dorothea Tanning, a capital ‘S’ surrealist. “It’s the doors! Though I don’t think the coffee is helping.” “This one scares me a bit,” she says, cautiously eyeing one portrait of the artist stood with a winged monkey-looking creature, a series of doors receding off into the distance behind her. Cate Le Bon is two coffees deep at the Tate Modern gallery, and her nerves are starting to jangle.
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