At the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, André Breton referred to a series of paintings by then-obscure artists Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff as being the “best and most truly Surrealist” of all the English contributions. Pailthorpe, a surgeon and trained psychoanalyst, and Mednikoff, an artist 23 years her junior, began living and working together a year prior, a collaboration they remained devoted to until Pailthorpe’s death in 1971. Their practice, which they termed “Psychorealism,” blurred the boundaries between psychoanalytic theory and art. By engaging with early memories and traumas, the artists believed their therapeutic practice would have widespread constructive and philanthropic use. Pailthorpe and Mednikoff made notes about each other’s artwork in their psychoanalytic sessions, devising an elaborate taxonomy of “hieroglyphs” to decode their automatic writing and drawing, translating shape, color, and line into expressions of the unconscious. Due to the often explicit, erotic, or scatological nature of these interpretations, they were inscribed discreetly in the back of frames, or kept in personal papers. In “A Tale of Mother’s Bones: Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff and the Birth of Psychorealism,” a survey exhibition at De La Warr Pavilion, several works have been mounted on freestanding metal frames arranged throughout the …