Cossette Zeno, 96, Finds Late Recognition Through Surrealism Surveys and Gallery Show
Cossette Zeno, a Puerto Rican Surrealist who exhibited alongside André Breton's circle in the 1950s, is the subject of a Richard Saltoun survey in New York. Her work featured in major institutional shows at the Met, Tate Modern and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
At 96, Cossette Zeno is finally receiving sustained attention. A small survey of her 1950s work is on view at Richard Saltoun's New York gallery through Friday, bringing together paintings made during her student years at the University of Puerto Rico and shortly after.
The exhibition follows Zeno's inclusion in two major institutional surveys: a globalized account of Surrealism that appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern between 2021 and 2022, and a 2024 exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth exploring the movement's Caribbean strain. Those appearances introduced her paintings to audiences far beyond the Caribbean.
Zeno's connection to Surrealism dates to the 1950s. After graduating from the University of Puerto Rico in 1953, she received a postgraduate scholarship to study at the École du Louvre in Paris, where she met André Breton, a cofounder of the movement. She exhibited alongside Surrealism's adherents in Europe. Yet she never received canonization, perhaps, as the article suggests, because of her gender or because of 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, partly because they felt alienated by their male counterparts.
Zeno's paintings encode political and personal themes through Surrealist imagery, as in Safe Journey (1951), where a blind beast threatens a boat but, in her reading, holds no power.
Her work is deeply rooted in her biography. Born in the Dominican Republic in 1930, Zeno and her family went into exile when she was a toddler and settled in Puerto Rico. "I call myself Puerto Rican," she said. In Old San Juan, she developed a closeness to nature—mountains, sea, and the ocean her grandmother showed her at dawn. Early oil crayon drawings feature swirling white forms that suggest shells in a current, while Tropical Haze (1954) uses vine-like lines against a greenish background.
At the University of Puerto Rico, Zeno studied under Eugenio Granell, a Spanish Surrealist whose leftist politics had driven him to the Caribbean during World War II. She struck out in a different direction from other Puerto Rican artists, encoding messages about the fight for independence in Surrealist visual language. Of Safe Journey (1951), she said the diamond arch signifies that "Puerto Rico is a poor country, but it's not poor." A fearsome beast reaches out to strike the boat, but it is blind, and so, she said, "there's no threat. It has no power."
Zeno has never maintained a studio and has moved frequently. She now lives in Jackson, Missouri, near her granddaughter. There have been periods when she stopped painting altogether, including the year her husband, Robert Bates, died. But she continues to work late into the night, beginning at 11 p.m. and going 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."
A new project will travel to Richard Saltoun's booth at Untitled Art, Miami Beach, in December: a painting spread across four full-size doors, which she is painting on the floor with "sea elements." The doors recall the portal in Let's Go Higher (1952), a painting in the current show. Of that work's single figure gesturing atop a cube, she said: "He's saying, 'Always up, never down.'"
