At 96, Surrealist Painter Cossette Zeno Finally Gets Her Due

Cossette Zeno, 96, is the subject of a small survey of her 1950s work at Richard Saltoun's New York gallery, on view through Friday. The show arrives after the Puerto Rican painter appeared in two major Surrealism surveys: a globalized account of the movement at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern between 2021 and 2022, and an exploration of its Caribbean strain at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2024.

Standing before her 1952 painting Let's Go Higher, Zeno pointed to its oddities. The work, made while she was a student at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, shows cubes in a vacant, hazy landscape. Tiny figures climb the angular modules. One figure stands atop the only cube with a doorway. "He's saying, 'Always up, never down,'" Zeno said with a smile. The line suits a career that spans nearly a century yet reached global recognition only in the past few years.

Why did canonization elude her?

During the 1950s, Zeno forged a connection with André Breton, a cofounder of Surrealism, and exhibited alongside the movement's adherents in Europe. She never received canonization, possibly because of her gender or the limited geographic focus of many Western art historians. The scholar Whitney Chadwick has noted that many female Surrealists did not identify as members of the movement, feeling alienated by their male counterparts. That marginalization also sidelined Meret Oppenheim, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, all now considered essential to Surrealist art history.

Zeno claims the label without hesitation. "I call myself a Surrealist because I have their spirit of freedom. I have no fences. I am always evolving, baby!" she said.

That spirit is evident in Ni hablar del peluquín (No Use to Talk about the Little Wig), a 1952 painting featured in both institutional surveys. It depicts a monstrous tangle of flesh with snatches of hair. "That represents a guy," Zeno said. "He's thinking many things—you can decide what he's thinking. He has a toupee, so he's not a young guy."

Where Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and René Magritte depicted the nude female body as a locus of desire, Zeno estimated she had painted only one naked woman. "I like men," she quipped.

How does she work?

Zeno paints at night. She begins at 11 p.m. and goes to bed at 7 a.m. "Everybody who could bother me would be sleeping," she said. "I'm free from cooking. I don't have to clean the house." She added: "I'm fully aware of what I'm doing." Her nocturnal habit recalls the Cuban Surrealist Wifredo Lam's phrase: "When I don't sleep, I dream."

Born in the Dominican Republic in 1930, shortly after the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo seized power, Zeno went into exile with her family as a toddler. "I don't know Santo Domingo at all," she said. "That's why I call myself Puerto Rican." Her grandmother took her to the ocean at 6 a.m. to see little fish caught in bubbles. "I'm very close to nature," she said, and works such as Tropical Haze (1954), with vine-like lines on a greenish ground, bear that out.

At the University of Puerto Rico, she studied under Eugenio Granell, a Spanish Surrealist whose leftist politics drove him from Europe to the Caribbean during World War II. While other Puerto Rican artists advanced the nationalist spirit galvanized by the 1950 revolts against the US military, Zeno encoded her independence politics in Surrealist imagery. In Safe Journey (1951), a boat sails beneath a diamond arch. "Puerto Rico is a poor country, but it's not poor," she said. A blind beast reaches for the boat, but "there's no threat. It has no power."

After graduating in 1953, she studied at the École du Louvre in Paris on a postgraduate scholarship. There she met Breton, whose influence led her to name a daughter after his 1928 book Nadja.

What comes next?

Her father's illness called her back to the Caribbean in 1954, and upheaval followed: she was forced to leave Cuba twice, once after warning a coworker about Fulgencio Batista's regime—only to find the employee was a secret agent—and again after Castro changed Cuba's currency in 1961, rendering her money worthless.

Now based in Jackson, Missouri, near her granddaughter, Zeno has never maintained a studio and stopped painting for periods, including the year her husband, Robert Bates, died. She is working again on a painting spread across four full-size doors, begun after her grandson asked for a mural for his Atlanta hotel. Painted on the floor with "sea elements," the doors travel to Richard Saltoun's booth at Untitled Art, Miami Beach this December. As she put it: "You never go down, always up."