Studying in Florence in 1937, she returned to Paris, where she came to know Alberto Giacometti, Georges Bataille, André Masson and her future husband Patrick Waldberg.
She also attended discussion of the sacred at the College of Sociology, and contributed to Bataille's journal Acéphale.
There she was influenced by surrealist exiles, including Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp.
During this period she started working on "constructions" made of bound beech dowels, these were exhibited at the gallery Art Of This Century owned by Peggy Guggenheim, in 1943.
[1] From 1947 to 1948 she co-edited Da Costa Encyclopédique, a surrealist review, with the writer Robert Lebel.