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Artist Creates Stunning Mosaic Portraits Inspired by Colorful Patterns From African Culture

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Artist Creates Stunning Mosaic Portraits Inspired by Colorful Patterns From African Culture

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Greek visual designer Charis Tsevis is well known for his intricate digital mosaics. Usually in the form of portraits, his mosaic artworks feature a wide range of subjects spanning from popular TV characters and musicians to U.S. presidents and international athletes. Tsevis finds inspiration for his pieces in almost everything, taking striking elements from a vast array of visual imagery and combining them into thematic portraits. One of his latest series, titled African Bricks, was inspired by his visits to the African continent and his study of its many cultures.

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Greek visual designer Charis Tsevis is well known for his intricate digital mosaics. Usually in the form of portraits, his mosaic artworks feature a wide range of subjects spanning from popular TV characters and musicians to U.S. presidents and international athletes. Tsevis finds inspiration for his pieces in almost everything, taking striking elements from a vast array of visual imagery and combining them into thematic portraits. One of his latest series, titled African Bricks, was inspired by his visits to the African continent and his study of its many cultures.

He has just recently introduced the second installment of this stunning collection of artworks. These newest pieces come several years after the first African Bricks mosaics that he created back in 2016. They follow the concept of the African matchbox house, which Tsevis was struck by during his time in several African townships. Like the bricks and diverse materials used to construct the walls of those houses, he constructs his pieces using various patterns, textures, fabrics, papers, embroidery, and any other material that he can find to "[reflect] the passion and the beauty of Africa."

"Africa was love at first sight," Tsevis tells My Modern Met. "I have learned so much about its cultures, but most of all I have felt that there was something so important in this land. The open spaces, the nature, the animals, the people, the history, the dramas, and the victories...And then there were the houses in the townships and the informal settlements of Soweto. People used bricks and any kind of material they could find to build a home, a nest, a shelter. I have seen so much courage and so much creativity in all these houses. For me, these are the celebration of life. An incredible puzzle, an amazing mosaic of symbols, messages, and feelings. It was a no-brainer to use this idea for my personal art."

Among the portrait subjects in Tsevis's latest installment of African Bricks are award-winning writer and poet Amanda Gorman and the Jamaican American reggae artist Keznamdi. Gorman's portrait is titled And still I rise, after a famous poem by Maya Angelou, and the powerful piece expertly captures her arresting gaze and quiet confidence. Star-power aside, the series in its entirety is visually stunning with its use of vibrant colors and its complex patchwork of designs. Each individual component is combined to make a composite and unified whole.

Scroll down to see incredible artworks from Tsevis' African Bricks series. For even more from the artist, you can visit his website and follow him on Instagram.

Greek artist Charis Tsevis created a series of stunning digital mosaic portraits titled African Bricks, which was inspired by African matchbox houses.

My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Charis Tsevis.

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Artist Creates Stunning Mosaic Portraits Inspired by Colorful Patterns From African Culture

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Greek visual designer Charis Tsevis is well known for his intricate digital mosaics. Usually in the form of portraits, his mosaic artworks feature a wide range of subjects spanning from popular TV characters and musicians to U.S. presidents and international athletes.

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Tufts of Printed Fabric Form Colorful Mixed-Media Portraits by Marcellina Oseghale Akpojotor

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Tufts of Printed Fabric Form Colorful Mixed-Media Portraits by Marcellina Oseghale Akpojotor

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Using scraps of vibrant Ankara fabric, Lagos-based artist Marcellina Oseghale Akpojotor fashions intimate portraits that consider the fragmented and varied inner lives of her subjects. The intricately composed depictions rely on a cacophony of patterns arranged in loose ripples and tufts, creating a patchwork of color and texture. Although the textiles are Dutch in origin—they’re colloquially known as “African print fabrics”—they have a strong cultural significance, and by piecing together the assorted motifs, Akpojotor establishes a shared visual memory.

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Using scraps of vibrant Ankara fabric, Lagos-based artist Marcellina Oseghale Akpojotor fashions intimate portraits that consider the fragmented and varied inner lives of her subjects. The intricately composed depictions rely on a cacophony of patterns arranged in loose ripples and tufts, creating a patchwork of color and texture. Although the textiles are Dutch in origin-they're colloquially known as "African print fabrics"-they have a strong cultural significance, and by piecing together the assorted motifs, Akpojotor establishes a shared visual memory.

Set against uncluttered, domestic backdrops rendered in acrylic, the fiber-based figures are often disrupted with small spots of paint as a way to "speak to the influence our environment has in shaping us as individuals," Akpojotor shares. "They represent the connections we have with our background and immediate society and how these often ignored elements form a part of our being." Navigating the links between subjects and their surroundings is an ongoing concern for the artist, whose work delves into the effects of the current moment, in addition to the ways personal histories and the actions of previous generations have lasting impacts.

Akpojotor is represented by Rele Gallery, where her work will be on view later this month, and she's currently working on pieces that explore how education affects women's empowerment, which you can follow on Instagram. (via Women's Art)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member and support independent arts publishing. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, help support our interview series, gain access to partner discounts, and much more. Join now!

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Tufts of Printed Fabric Form Colorful Mixed-Media Portraits by Marcellina Oseghale Akpojotor

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Using scraps of vibrant Ankara fabric, Lagos-based artist Marcellina Oseghale Akpojotor fashions intimate portraits that consider the fragmented and varied inner lives of her subjects. The intricately composed depictions rely on a cacophony of patterns arranged in loose ripples and tufts, creating a

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Williamsburg Portraits 1991-2

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Williamsburg Portraits 1991-2

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Amy Sillman, “Williamsburg Portraits” 1991–92

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Williamsburg Portraits 1991-2

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Amy Sillman, “Williamsburg Portraits” 1991–92a

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Nathaniel Mary QuinnFOLLOWINGNOT FAR FROM HOME; STILL FAR AWAY

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Nathaniel Mary QuinnFOLLOWINGNOT FAR FROM HOME; STILL FAR AWAY

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Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Double-Barreled Shotgun (2021). Charcoal, gouache, and soft pastel on Coventry vellum paper. 121.9 × 114.3 cm. © Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Courtesy Gagosian.

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Artist Illustrates His Battle With Depression as a Mystical World of Spirit Animals

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Artist Illustrates His Battle With Depression as a Mystical World of Spirit Animals

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Polish artist and graphic designer Dawid Planeta summons gigantic beasts in his series of grayscale illustrations set in a mysterious land. Titled Mini People in the Jungle, his work explores the artist’s personal experience with depression, visualizing the mental journey through dark times. Planeta explains, “It’s a story of a man descending into darkness and chaos in search of himself.”

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Polish artist and graphic designer Dawid Planeta summons gigantic beasts in his series of grayscale illustrations set in a mysterious land. Titled Mini People in the Jungle, his work explores the artist's personal experience with depression, visualizing the mental journey through dark times. Planeta explains, "It's a story of a man descending into darkness and chaos in search of himself."

A small figure appears throughout the poignant series, perhaps representing Planeta himself. He's seen wandering through the fog-filled labyrinth, bravely facing the ominous jungle animals who feature glowing eyes that illuminate the darkness. They seem to be guiding him through the deep jungle, "to find his inner strength, find the light and come back with it." And, Planeta explains, "When he knows who he is, he goes there again, this time without fear. He goes there because it's a part of who he is. It's a part of human nature you can't ignore. You need to know all parts of life, dark and bright."

Despite the difficulty of dealing with depression, Planeta managed to channel his feelings into creativity. "Depression-it's not easy to deal with, but when you try, you can stop thinking about it as a weakness and turn it into something brilliant," he says. "That's what I aim to accomplish with my art. Things I'm trying to depict are dark, mysterious and frightening, but if you look closely, you will find excitement, passion and joy. Just open your mind and see."

You can see more from Planeta's portfolio on Behance and purchase prints from the Mini People in the Jungle series on Displate.

Polish artist Dawid Planeta's series Mini People in the Jungle illustrates his battle with depression.

A small figure is seen wandering through the fog-filled labyrinth, bravely facing gigantic beasts.

Their glowing eyes illuminate the darkness, helping him to find his way.
10 Expressive Photographers Whose Poignant Images Shed Light on Depression Interview: Photographer Poetically Captures What It's Like Living with Depression Electric Neon Illustrations of Fantasy Forests and the Majestic Beasts Within Ethereal Paintings of Spirit Animals Wandering Through Landscapes Bursting with Color Dawid Planeta: Behance | Facebook | Instagram | Tumblr
My Modern Met granted permission to use photos by Dawid Planeta.

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Artist Illustrates His Battle With Depression as a Mystical World of Spirit Animals

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Polish artist Dawid Planeta's series "Mini People in the Jungle" illustrates his battle with depression. A small figure is seen wandering through the fog-filled labyrinth, bravely facing gigantic jungle animals. Their glowing eyes illuminate the darkness, helping him to find his way.

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Peter Jacobs is an artist who has made a collage from the daily newspaper every day since March 31, 2005. "State of the Arts" visits Jacobs at his Montclair studio, and talks to him about the meditative aspect of his daily ritual and its relationship to his photography and painting.

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State of the Arts
Peter Jacobs is an artist who has made a collage from the daily newspaper every day since March 31, 2005. "State of the Arts" visits Jacobs at his Montclair studio, and talks to him about the meditative aspect of his daily ritual and its relationship to his photography and painting.

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State of the Arts | Peter Jacobs, Collage Artist

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State of the Arts Peter Jacobs is an artist who has made a collage from the daily newspaper every day since March 31, 2005. "State of the Arts" visits Jacobs at his Montclair studio, and talks to him about the meditative aspect of his daily ritual and its relationship to his photography and painting.

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On March 31st 2005, I created a collage using that day's New York Times, and have continued that process without interruption every day since.

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T his is an amazing body of work. Each piece speaks worlds. Just the idea that Peter did this every day for 10 years is remarkable.
The discipline required unimaginable...and then add in the never ending poetry and politics.

Mary Birmingham1
Curator of The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey

Like many of us, Peter Jacobs begins each day at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the New York Times. After digesting the news he creates a collage using images and text from that day's newspaper, a practice the artist has continued without interruption since March 31, 2005. He observes, "The Collage Journal has become integrated in my daily life as a meditation, contemplation and re-evaluation of culture and identity." Jacobs fashions these daily collages on the pages of spiral-bound sketchbooks. Intimate in scale and feeling, these compositions are like jazz improvisations that riff on both external events and the interior world of the artist. On the reverse of each collage he pastes words or phrases culled from that day's paper, including the dateline. The words have no direct relationship to the imagery (beyond their common source) but instead reflect the artist's free-form responses. In his ongoing dialogue with the newspaper, Jacobs contextualizes the daily news, transforming it into artwork that is both personal and universal.

Jacobs mines all the components of the newspaper for his raw materials-news photos, art, advertisements, background colors and typography-combining whole images with fragments. Sometimes he cuts new figures or shapes directly from the paper, in a manner reminiscent of Matisse, who called his late collage work "drawing with scissors." Often Jacobs achieves effects that appear surreal, with odd juxtapositions, ambiguous spaces, disembodied body parts and incongruent scales. While the individual collages do not directly represent real people and events, recognizable figures like popes, president and celebrities sometimes make appearances, and fragments of images can reflect real events. Many of the daily collages are purely abstract compositions. Despite the consistency in materials, technique, and format, the artist manages to make each day's work fresh and unique.

Jacobs archives The Collage Journal, storing the actual sketchbooks in special cases; he has also created an online digital archive that documents each day's entry. For the past several years he has posted his daily collage on a blog linked to his website as well as on the social networking site, Facebook. This provides a way for viewers to react immediately to the work (and many of them respond with comments.) This interactivity between the artist and his followers on the Internet expands the scope of the Collage Journal so that it becomes part of the daily routines of others. There is a conceptual symmetry in the process: Jacobs takes visual information from the daily newspaper, dissects and reconstructs it in a private daily ritual, and shares the resulting collages on the Internet, placing the altered material back into the public realm. His use of the newspaper as a source material underscores Jacobs's affinity with the Dada artists who nearly one hundred years ago embraced collage as an effective means to dissolve the boundaries between art and everyday life; his use of technology to communicate these ideas places Jacobs firmly in the twenty-first century.

Marina Delaney
Chair: Visual Arts Dept., Dowling College

Peter Jacobs, who has been involved with the art of collage for over two decades has developed a complex visual language that seeks to reconcile the rational with the irrational. Jacobs' collages are usually comprised of spliced images applied to an architectonic framework. The stability of the architectural foundation allows him to juxtapose incongruous elements that, in spite of themselves, produce a singular cohesive vision. Instinctively the artist seems to assert the primacy of visual relationships over knowledge: in his world it is color, line and space, not reason, that are determinants of logic. The art of collage, as a reconfiguration of discarded images, is a medium destined to render order out of chaos. Jacobs has understood this inherent dilemna and resolves it in a manner that is decidedly postmodern. Passages of humor and wit, beauty and nature, psychology and rhetoric, coexist as a fragmented though unified whole. Indeed, Jacobs continues to reconsider the formal aspects of collage while adhering to the basic principles of its Cubist origins,as an ironic form of expression.

Dan Bischoff
Arts Editor, The Star Ledger

Montclair artist Peter Jacobs has been keeping track of our times by turning them into a collage - he cuts out images from a newspaper with an X-Acto blade and glues them into Strathmore sketchbooks, creating remarkably integrated original images composed by sight (there are no computer algorithms choosing and shaping his work).

Vivien Raynor
Arts Editor, The New York Times

Peter Jacobs cuts strips from high-grade reproductions of fauna (mostly fish) and flora. He then weaves them together, producing collages that are as rich and dense as any medieval stained glass window, particularly the roundel with an orange cap at the center - this imprinted with the legend, New Castle Brown Ale.

Richard DiGangi

You have never failed to amaze me with how the material is rearranged, if that is a proper word to use in the collage making process, to express a vision. They always evoke in me some sort of a response. I don't know if it is something that you have intended, or if it is just the external wrapping of a vision personal to only you. Your cleverness of mind gives me a glimmer of hope for the human condition.
* Featured Artist on State of The Arts: PBS Television: watch the Video CLICK To See Artist Talk with Eric Levin , Hunterdon Art Museum 5/17/2015
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The Artful Blogger Review: ILENE DUBE
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*Kolaj Magazine, Montreal, June 2015
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Visual Arts Center of New Jersey 2012
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Featured Artist in the Winter 2011 Strathmore Artist Newsletter
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Exposition France
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Work on View at The Montclair Art Museum: Opening Thursday, September 23, 2010

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* Read the New Jersey Monthly article (April 2010) about artist * Read The Montclair Times article (April 2010) about artist
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Recent Exhibitions
* Read the New Jersey Monthly article (April 2010) about artist * Read The Montclair Times article (April 2010) about artist
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T his is an amazing body of work. Each piece speaks worlds. Just the idea that Peter did this every day for 10 years is remarkable. The discipline required unimaginable...and then add in the never ending poetry and politics.

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Artist cuts up and reassembles the New York Times for exhibit

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Artist cuts up and reassembles the New York Times for exhibit

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That Peter Jacobs begins each day cutting up the Times and pasting it into an 9-by-12-inch Strathmore watercolor journal seems like it should be less important than the intriguing images that result. And yet his process is just as intriguing.

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The daily ritual begins before dawn. A "thunk" startles a cat as the blue bundle is tossed onto the porch. An early riser removes the paper from its damp plastic sleeve and rolls it out on the breakfast table, where it catches coffee spills and cereal dribbles. And that's only the beginning - tangential uses for the New York Times range from mulching the garden to wrapping breakables.

That Peter Jacobs begins each day cutting up the Times and pasting it into an 9-by-12-inch Strathmore watercolor journal seems like it should be less important than the intriguing images that result. And yet his process is just as intriguing.

The 54-year-old photographer, printer, curator and artist, who is married to a sculptor, has been spreading out his self-healing mat and cutting up the news with an X-Acto knife for a decade. In that time he has gone through 244 self-healing cutting boards, 342 Exacto blades and 374 glue-sticks. Peter Jacobs: The Collage Journal - The First Decade is on view at the Hunterdon Art Museum through Sept. 6.

"Each day I extract, redefine and compose the media's elements in many ways," he says. "They are paintings with paper, theatrical stages of abstracted color and rhythms, layers that imbue surreal narratives, symbolism hidden in humor, the irony of culture, and pure visual perception."

And yet when we look, we ask ourselves "Where is the newspaper?" Where is the old gray lady, with her black and white text? It is, in fact, the color that Jacobs focuses on, creating new shapes and forms. He likes pattern - checkerboard and diamond patterns, dots - and architectural elements. We see archways in a Roman amphitheater, a reclining female nude, the shadow of a man surrendering to the vortex.

Subscribing to the theory that the viewer creates the meaning of a work of art, I see a turquoise-eyed bird dancing in a prison uniform. A work from 2009 shows a man with his hands holding his head in anguish. Another hand holding a disc with yet another hand rises from his head. From outside the stockade fence that surrounds him, a chorus of boys sings. And in another work, dancers reminiscent of Matisse's cutouts fly through colonnaded spaces.

These works are dreamlike and associative. What fun a psychotherapist might have, asking patients to interpret these images.

Over the years, Jacobs has perfected his technique, incorporating more color and becoming more abstract. The works, pasted with an acid-free glue stick, have become journal entries in their discipline, the routine of doing this every day at the same time, and they reveal something deep within the artist that most would find difficult to express in a journal.

Jacobs achieves the magical act of beginning with one object - a newspaper - and ending with something completely different, so different that you cannot identify what he started with, you cannot figure out how he did it.

It seems that the artist has become addicted to the daily news. He gets edgy if there's a blizzard that delays delivery, and has been known to print out the morning edition from the newspaper's website if it doesn't arrive. He fears going on cruises, where daily delivery cannot be guaranteed, and when his wife had to have surgery he brought his tools to the hospital. The process helped him manage the stress (and, by the way, the surgery went well).

Jacobs has been making collages since the 1980s. Having studied photography at SUNY Purchase, he discovered that if he brushed solvent over the images in National Geographic, the ink would bleed, creating a painterly effect. He cut them apart and reassembled them, and had his first exhibition in New York in 1983. "Where the solvent blurred the line between abstraction and representation, the collage both fractured it and reassembled the pieces into a coherent new whole," writes Eric Levin in the exhibition catalog.

His large-scale mixed media portraits were commissioned to open the new wing of the Montclair Art Museum in 2002. After that, he began scaling down and returning to his roots in collage. And three years later, over breakfast and the morning paper, he started on this path.

He initially set out to do one every day for a year, but a year become 10.

It is also about having a visual dialogue with the news, says Jacobs, responding to politics, the environment and divisions in the country. Images of bombed London subway stations, tsunami-ravaged villages of Indonesia, and war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq all form Jacobs' palette. Sandra Day O'Connor, Condoleeza Rice, George W. Bush and Liberace have been cut up and recycled, the original components not recognizable. What makes Collage Journal art is its ability to transform the images into something else.

"I rarely have a predetermined concept based on the news, nor an end result in mind from the start, Jacobs said. "Generally, there is a stew of what I am visually awakened by, my feelings of the moment and subconsciously, the news. I initially respond to certain elements from the newspaper - colors, textures, architecture and stories - and extract them. I continue to construct and deconstruct layers through a visual dialogue. Overall, it is a very intuitive process." When he starts a collage, he has no idea where it will end. "No one knows what the future will bring."

And while the news may not be beautiful, the collages are. Writes Levin in the catalog: "beauty is a prickly issue. It can soothe or stimulate, deceive, disguise, seduce... The pictures transcend their origins."

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The Artful Blogger is written by Ilene Dube and offers a look inside the art world of the greater Princeton area. Ilene Dube is an award-winning arts writer and editor, as well as an artist, curator and activist for the arts.

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Artist cuts up and reassembles the New York Times for exhibit - WHYY

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The daily ritual begins before dawn. A "thunk" startles a cat as the blue bundle is tossed onto the porch. An early riser removes the paper from its damp plastic sleeve and rolls it out on the breakfast table, where it catches coffee spills and cereal dribbles.

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Painted in isolation on the walls of his final home, and never intended for public viewing, Goya’s series of late, dark pictures have become icons. In Halloween week, MutualArt gets a bit too close to the works known as The Black Paintings

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Painted in isolation on the walls of his final home, and never intended for public viewing, Goya's series of late, dark pictures have become icons. In Halloween week, MutualArt gets a bit too close to the works known as The Black Paintings

In February 1819, Francisco de Goya, whose own ears were already rushing with the deafness brought on by lead poisoning, signed the deed of purchase for an isolated estate known as The Deaf Man's House. It was named for the previous tenant, but the nominative determinism is a telling detail of the great painter's later years. Onto the walls of his final home, Goya would paint a series of tenebrous and horrifying works which he never intended anyone to see. They came to be known as The Black Paintings.

Francisco de Goya, Dog (1819-1823)

Goya had, thus far, led a social life, full of conversation and song. His reputation as a genius painter rested on his searching, intimate portraits. He habitually sought and loved the company of people from all social backgrounds - as Juan José Junquera notes, when the painter moved from rural Aragon to Madrid in 1774, "working people of all kinds, from muleteers, builders, tradesmen, dandies and dirty old men to young people, began to refine his brushstrokes, sharpen his vision, brighten his colours and prepare him for what was to become the basis of his career as a painter - the portrait." He was a painter of people. He was a man of the people. He was, in the modern sense, 'a people person.'

Francisco de Goya, Two Old Men (1819-1823)

Social, political, and physical transformations in Goya's life changed the ebullient youth of Madrid into the reclusive man who painted some of art history's most disturbed and disturbing pictures.

Francisco de Goya, Men Reading (1819-1823)

Luscious oils and the spring of canvas gave a taut sense of social humanity to his best portraits. Their light imbued flesh with a living quality, their faith to reality gave a sense of honesty - an honesty only redoubled by the liberties he took to make the eyes supernaturally expressive, the fasciae exaggeratedly communicative. His Portrait of Maria Luisa de Parma (1789) is a perfect example of these qualities, whilst also showcasing the keenness of observation and detail which allowed him to both celebrate and complicate the lavishness of Madrid's upper classes.

Francisco de Goya, Two Old Men Eating Soup (1819-1823)

If it seems a very long way from such sumptuous, social painting to the unforgiving bleakness of the picture known as The Dog (1819-1823), or the unrelenting horror of his picture of Saturn, it might be worth thinking again about what might motivate such a man as Goya to imagine and enact such things as The Black Paintings. Perhaps, because we fear the loss of the things we love, and because that loss is absolutely assured in death, the Black Paintings exist within and behind those images and objects we cherish as materially "good." If we think again, perhaps Goya was always destined to bring such images into the world. And, because we may as well do so without flinching, that terrible image of Saturn is as good a place to start thinking again.

Francisco de Goya, Judith and Holofernes (1819-1823)

Some consider Peter Paul Rubens' Saturn Devouring His Son (1636) to be the definitive depiction of this scene from Greek mythology, in which the Titan Cronus ('Saturn' in the Roman myth) eats each of his children upon birth, because a prophecy foresaw that his child would overthrow him. Rubens ' picture is more 'realistic,' perhaps increasing its sense of horror, with Saturn himself depicted as a cold-hearted old crony, on the scale of an ordinary human, systematically erasing threat, untroubled by his actions. The triple-star in Rubens' painting is the planet Saturn and its rings, which 17th century astrologers mistook for two stars rising alongside.

Francisco de Goya, The Witches' Sabbath (1819-1823)

Instead of depicting Saturn as human, the tormented Goya plumbs the depths of the imagination and brings back a twisted Titan, an image so monstrous that it has become ingrained in the minds of viewers for hundreds of years. The gore and the grotesquery are unbridled. It is almost universally considered the scariest painting of all time. But if it were simply a conjuring of the imagination, it would perhaps be less affecting. To some extent, its potency relies on the fact that all works of disturbing art function as evidence of an extremely troubled human mind. What must the artist have suffered, we ask ourselves, to come up with such a twisted picture?

Francisco de Goya, Procession of the Holy Office (1819-1823)

But, the present discussion argues, Goya's picture is particularly scary precisely because we can see it foreshadowed in his earlier work. We've said that the light in Goya's portraits gave a living, fulsome quality to the sitter's flesh. Yet, as John Berger notes, "Goya lived and observed through something near enough to total war to know that night is security and that it is the dawn that one fears. The light in his work is merciless for the simple reason that it shows up cruelty."

Francisco de Goya, The Fates (1819-1823)

The light points the way for the enemy. Light is frailty and ephemerality. On that taut and nubile canvas, the lit flesh looks good enough to eat. Berger again: "The flesh has an expression of its own - as features do in portraits by other painters. The expression varies according to the sitter, but it is always a variation on the same demand: the demand for flesh as food for an appetite. Nor is that a rhetorical metaphor. It is almost literally true. Sometimes the flesh has a bloom on it like fruit. Sometimes it is flushed and hungry-looking, ready to devour. Usually - and this is the fulcrum of his intense psychological insight - it suggests both simultaneously: the devourer and the to-be-devoured."

Francisco de Goya, Leocadia (1819-1823)

And so, in the act of devouring, the nubile fleshy spring of the canvas is pierced by the devourer. It gives way to the matte, lifeless, form of Saturn's bleeding son, painted directly onto the stone of The Deaf Man's house. In his later life, Goya became appalled and terrified by the appetites of the flesh. Hence his depiction of Judith slaying her rapist. Hence the painting of women laughing, perhaps deriding male sexuality.

Francisco de Goya, Women Laughing (1819-1823)

Goya's paintings are always defined by action. At one point, this was a social impulse. Later, it is the active opposite. And so the Black Paintings are not just representations of 'lack.' They are the willed purpose of non-being, the archetypal harbingers of the opposite of life. Their yawning spaces are not just empty, they have been emptied. Flesh does not just decay unto death: it is devoured. Time doesn't pass, is not 'passive': it is exacting and ritualized. And, in the deaf man's house, silence is not just the absence of noise: it roars.

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In February 1819, Francisco de Goya, whose own ears were already rushing with the deafness brought on by lead poisoning, signed the deed of purchase for an isolated estate known as The Deaf Man's House. It was named for the previous tenant, but the nominative determinism is a telling detail of the great painter's later years.

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How Leonora Carrington Feminized Surrealism

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How Leonora Carrington Feminized Surrealism

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Each time the work of the British-Mexican artist and writer is reborn, it seems more prescient.

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How Leonora Carrington Feminized Surrealism

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Each time the work of the British-Mexican artist and writer is reborn, it seems more prescient.

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The Swiss expat created some of the most dark and unsettling yet brilliant paintings during the late 18th century, producing an oeuvre that was hailed by the Surrealists almost 200 years later.

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The Swiss expat created some of the most dark and unsettling yet brilliant paintings during the late 18th century, producing an oeuvre that was hailed by the Surrealists almost 200 years later.

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781, oil on canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts

Henry Fuseli was born in the winter of 1741 in the city of Zürich, Switzerland. The son of Swiss painter and writer Johann Caspar Füssli, he studied in his native city but was forced to flee to England for political reasons in 1763. The painter, draughtsman and writer became a leading figure in the London art world of the late 18 th century and is most well-known for being the creator of the hauntingly surreal masterpiece The Nightmare, but the 1781 oil painting is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg of Fuseli's strange and supernatural oeuvre. His paintings are often hellishly hallucinatory in their intensity, and are rife with Romantic themes of violence, insanity, and nocturnal fear.

Mad Kate, 1806-7, oil on canvas, Goethe House, Frankfurt

Fuseli had a penchant for illustrating scenes from plays and poems, which is only natural considering that he was also a writer himself. Mad Kate, which depicts a servant girl who has lost her mental faculties upon hearing that her lover has been lost at sea, illustrates a poem of similar name by William Cowper:
"A serving-maid was she, and fell in love With one who left her, went to sea, and died. Her fancy followed him through foaming waves To distant shores, and she would sit and weep..."
Fuseli's Mad Kate masterfully captures the poor servant girl's insanity. Her eyes wild and widened, penetrating from the stretched canvas, her delicate and useless hands poised in an animal-like manner, her insensibly bare foot bracing against the sea-born tempest that lashes at her disheveled hair, swirling cloak, and pale flesh.

Ariel, c. 1800-10, oil on canvas, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

Under commission, Fuseli painted a large number of pieces for Alderman Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery in London in the 1880s. The works of the famed playwright would go on to be a huge source of inspiration for Fuseli, who would create at least eighty-five paintings, drawings, sketches, and engravings from The Bard's plays during the course of his artistic lifetime. Ariel is from Act V, scene i of The Tempest, where Ariel, soon to be granted freedom by Prospero sings:
"Where the bee sucks, there suck I; In a cowslip's bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry. On the bat's back I do fly After summer merrily. Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough."
The painting is lighter in tone than many of Fuseli's others - his scenes illustrating Macbeth in Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery were noted for reveling in the monumental and grotesque.

Silence, c. 1799-1801, oil on canvas, Kunsthaus Zürich

Silence is a decidedly strange painting of Fuseli's. It contains no symbolism, no obvious literary influence, and leaves much to the viewer's imagination, yet it remains one of Fuseli's most striking compositions. There is something profoundly unsettling about the piece, and it doesn't take much to figure out what that something is. The painting's subject is obviously in the throes of severe emotional distress - a distress that they are unable to communicate to any other soul. This draws feelings of great empathy from the viewer, especially when one starts to ask questions, such as 'why?', 'who?' and 'how?' This is only intensified by Fuseli's apt use of chiaroscuro, casting the subject in the white light of innocence against a background of a malignant darkness.

The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches, 1796, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Laced with black magic, sexuality, and horror, Fuseli's Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches explores strikingly similar themes to that of The Nightmare, but its execution is laced with much more malevolence and impending violence. The macabre piece was painted for Fuseli's Milton Gallery, which was established so the painter could exhibit works illustrating the life and writings of 17 th century English poet, intellectual, and civil servant John Milton, and was born from the following passage of his epic poem Paradise Lost (II, 622-66):
"...follow the night-hag, when, called In secret, riding through the air she comes, Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance With Lapland witches, while the labouring moon Eclipses at their charms."
The term 'night-hag' in Milton's epic poem is said to be an epithet for Hecate - the ancient Greek goddess associated with witchcraft, night, sorcery, and necromancy - among other unsavory things. Interestingly, a night-hag is also the name given to an otherworldly creature responsible for the phenomenon of sleep paralysis. Often those afflicted with the condition are stricken with a particular symptom resembling that of a creature sitting on their chest, rendering them unable to move, as can be clearly seen in Fuseli's Nightmare - which also features a quite literal 'night mare,' poking its frightful head through the crimson draped curtain. There is certainly a cross-over here, as in Night-Hag there can be seen an equine creature "riding through the air."

In 1980 the painting resurfaced at an auction at Sotheby's after it was believed to have been lost for many years due to its bequeathment from its previous owner, Mrs. Boyd of Penkill Castle, Ayrshire, to her maid, a Mrs. Smith, as she could not stand the sight of it. Since then, The Night-Hag has dwelled in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

James Northcote, Henry Fuseli, 1778, oil on canvas, National Portrait Gallery, London

Fuseli died in 1825, but not before contributing greatly to the art world. Many younger British painters of the period were heavily influenced by his work, including William Blake, who was a student of his, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Surrealists would later adopt Fuseli as a surrogate father, which is not at all surprising considering that the core of the movement is to work intuitively, drawing deep from the well of the subconscious. The Surrealists praised him directly during their 1936 New York-based exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, expressing that " one of the most unexplored regions of art is dreams. " When Fuseli was forced to flee his native Switzerland as a young man, it was the consequence of helping to expose an unjust magistrate, whose powerful family sought revenge. Taking this into account, it is not surprising that Fuseli's paintings are filled with such profound intensity, and are rife with nightmarish visions and the threat of, if not, actual violence. The same year that Fuseli left his homeland, he had also taken orders, as his father had planned Henry for the church. Thankfully, fate intervened, as it is extremely unlikely that he would have gone on to produce the paintings that he did if that had been so.

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Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781, oil on canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts Henry Fuseli was born in the winter of 1741 in the city of Zürich, Switzerland. The son of Swiss painter and writer Johann Caspar Füssli, he studied in his native city but was forced to flee to England for political reasons in 1763.

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Graceful Swimmers Breach the Water’s Surface in Sonia Alins’s Poetic Mixed-Media Illustrations

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Graceful Swimmers Breach the Water’s Surface in Sonia Alins’s Poetic Mixed-Media Illustrations

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Although Alins primarily centers women in ambiguous states of emotion, men and children have been emerging in her mixed-media illustrations, further reflecting on the artist’s own experience with motherhood and the incomparable force of aquatic environments. “I feel the water as powerful entity, a supernatural force capable of source anguish, pain, desperation in the same way that it is a source of happiness, joy, inner peace, and love. Water helps me to express my feelings ​in a louder way, and it’s why I love it,” she tells Colossal.

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In Sonia Alins's dreamy works, figures gently break through the surface of the sea, creating a minimal ripple around their bodies as they dip in and out of the water. The Spanish artist and illustrator ( previously) is known for her expressive swimmers, whose enlarged limbs splay in graceful positions as they float and move through the ocean. Translucent sheets of vellum produce the cloudy effects of water, obscuring fish and coral and adding a three-dimensional element to the largely ink, acrylic, and watercolor drawings.

Although Alins primarily centers women in ambiguous states of emotion, men and children have been emerging in her mixed-media illustrations, further reflecting on the artist's own experience with motherhood and the incomparable force of aquatic environments. "I feel the water as powerful entity, a supernatural force capable of source anguish, pain, desperation in the same way that it is a source of happiness, joy, inner peace, and love. Water helps me to express my feelings ​in a louder way, and it's why I love it," she tells Colossal.

Alins works on a variety of commissions in addition to her personal practice, and her ethereal project for Moleskine titled " The Beautiful Red Reefs" recently won her an Award of Excellence from Communication Arts's annual competition. Browse originals and hand-embellished prints in limited quantities in her shop, and you can keep up with her illustrations, in addition to news about upcoming shows like the one at Taipei's Contemporary by U gallery in October, on Behance and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member and support independent arts publishing. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, help support our interview series, gain access to partner discounts, and much more. Join now!

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Graceful Swimmers Breach the Water's Surface in Sonia Alins's Poetic Mixed-Media Illustrations

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In Sonia Alins's dreamy works, figures gently break through the surface of the sea, creating a minimal ripple around their bodies as they dip in and out of the water. The Spanish artist and illustrator (previously) is known for her expressive swimmers, whose enlarged limbs splay in graceful position

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Wangechi Mutu, Kenyan, b. 1972, The Great Key Holder Esquire XXX, 2003, Ink, collage, Letraset and spray paint on mylar 32 1/2 × 20 3/4 in, 82.6 × 52.7 cm

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Wangechi Mutu, Kenyan, b. 1972, The Great Key Holder Esquire XXX, 2003, Ink, collage, Letraset and spray paint on mylar 32 1/2 × 20 3/4 in, 82.6 × 52.7 cm

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Wangechi Mutu explores the violence and misrepresentation that women, particularly black women, experience in the contemporary world. Referencing artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Chris Ofili, and Romare Bearden, as well as art-historical movements like Surrealism, her drawings and collages graft together images from anthropological, ethnographic and medical texts, Vogue, and pornography. Mutu commonly works on paper or Mylar, applying her sampled figures along with ink, acrylic paint, and materials like plastic pearls. She has spoken of her art—which includes sculpture and installations with similar coiled, hybrid imagery—as using the aesthetic of rejection and wretchedness to explore the hopeful or sublime.

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Wangechi Mutu | The Great Key Holder Esquire XXX (2003) | Available for Sale | Artsy

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Medium Condition Signature Hand-signed by artist, signed, titled and dated 2003 Certificate of authenticity Included (issued by gallery) Wangechi Mutu explores the violence and misrepresentation that women, particularly black women, experience in the contemporary world.

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Paula Rego, Portuguese, b. 1935 The Judgement, 1991/2020 Hand coloured etching on Somerset paper 17 × 18 7/10 in, 43.3 × 47.6 cm, Edition of 50

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Paula Rego, Portuguese, b. 1935 The Judgement, 1991/2020 Hand coloured etching on Somerset paper 17 × 18 7/10 in, 43.3 × 47.6 cm, Edition of 50

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A “painter of stories” celebrated for her dark, complex paintings, prints, drawings, and collages, Paula Rego draws upon folk- and fairytales, literature, and her own biography to create politically charged, deeply unsettling tableaux. Her forceful compositions are imbued with cruelty—both subtle and overt—and permeated with a sense of unease and ambiguity. Foregrounding women and girls, and often using animals as stand-ins for humans, she depicts dysfunctional family relationships, political systems (like that of Portugal’s António de Oliveira Salazar), and social structures. Rego is fascinated by what she calls “the beautiful grotesque” in life and in art. As she describes: “It’s the divine, perhaps. […] I mean some other kind of divine, which connects very strongly to Portuguese folk tales and stories—the strength of them and, very often, the enormous cruelty involved. The cruelty is fascinating.”

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Genieve Figgis_Irish, b. 1972 Heracles and Omphale (after François Boucher), 2017 Archival Print 23 3/5 × 19 7/10 in, 60 × 50 cm, Edition of 50

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Genieve Figgis_Irish, b. 1972 Heracles and Omphale (after François Boucher), 2017 Archival Print 23 3/5 × 19 7/10 in, 60 × 50 cm, Edition of 50

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Genieve Figgis | Heracles and Omphale (after François Boucher) ( 2017) | Available for Sale | Artsy

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Archival pigment print - Signed and numbered on a gallery label affixed to the reverse Medium Signature Certificate of authenticity Salman Toor's sumptuous figurative paintings canonize the lives, loves, and struggles of queer men of color. The Pakistani-born, New York-based artist largely focuses on scenes of lanky, languorous brown-skinned figures drinking, dancing, and finding love in an emerald-tinted metropolis.

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Ana Maria Pacheco_Brazilian, b. 1943 A Modern Bestiary - Armadillo, 2004 Screenprint 9 2/5 × 7 7/10 in, 24 × 19.5 cm, Edition of 25 + 0AP

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Ana Maria Pacheco_Brazilian, b. 1943 A Modern Bestiary - Armadillo, 2004 Screenprint 9 2/5 × 7 7/10 in, 24 × 19.5 cm, Edition of 25 + 0AP

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The tradition of the bestiary, text and image, has continued to have unabated appeal, as evidenced by the many versions and variations created through the centuries. ‘A Modern Bestiary’ was also published as an artist's book with twenty original screenprints by Ana Maria Pacheco accompanied by forty poems by George Szirtes. With wit and invention in word and image, many of the animals and birds - the traditional exempla of the bestiary - are given very contemporary connotations, be they political, ecological or social.

Also published as an Artist's Book – twenty screenprints accompanied by forty poems by George Szirtes. Further information on request.

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The Artist Who Embraced the Occult and Defied the Surrealists

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The Artist Who Embraced the Occult and Defied the Surrealists

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British artist Ithell Colquhoun’s uncanny paintings are full of androgynous gods, murderous goddesses, yoni-like fruit, and disembodied, fleshy parts floating across hallucinatory, dreamlike landscapes.

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The Artist Who Embraced the Occult and Defied the Surrealists

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Ithell Colquhoun was a contemporary of Salvador Dali and André Breton, but her involvement with the occult saw her ostracized from the movement.

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Why Contemporary Artists Are Embracing Spirituality in Their Work

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Why Contemporary Artists Are Embracing Spirituality in Their Work

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In recent years, we’ve witnessed renewed momentum surrounding spirituality in the art world. At museums, late artists who dove deeply into mysticism and religion are gaining posthumous attention.

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Why Contemporary Artists Are Embracing Spirituality in Their Work

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Contemporary artists are infusing their works with spiritual concepts and religious iconography in efforts to reflect on conflicts and crises of the present.

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A Visit to Wangechi Mutu’s Nairobi Studio Explores Her Profound Ties to Nature and the Feminine

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A Visit to Wangechi Mutu’s Nairobi Studio Explores Her Profound Ties to Nature and the Feminine

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"I truly believe that there’s something about taking these bits and pieces of trees, and animals and completely anonymous but extremely identifiable items and placing them somewhere that draws their energy, wherever they were coming from, whatever they did, whatever molten lava they came out of a million years ago, that is now in my work and that little piece of energy is magnified."

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Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu made history in 2019 when her four bronze sculptures became the first ever to occupy the niches of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 's facade. Stretching nearly seven feet, the seated quartet evokes images of heavily adorned African queens and intervenes in the otherwise homogenous canons of art history held within the institution's walls.

The monumental figures are one facet of Mutu's nuanced body of work that broadly challenges colonialist, racist, and sexist ideologies. Now on view at San Francisco's Legion of Honor is the latest iteration of the artist's subversive projects: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening? disperses imposing hybrid creatures in bronze and towering sculptures made of soil, branches, charcoal, cowrie shells, and other organic materials throughout the neoclassical galleries. The figurative works draw a direct connection between the Black female body and ecological devastation as they reject the long-held ideals elevated in the space.

No matter the medium, these associations reflect Mutu's deep respect for and fascination with the ties between nature, the feminine, and African history and culture, a guiding framework that the team at Art21 explores in a recently released documentary. Wangechi Mutu: Between the Earth and the Sky visits the artist's studio in her hometown of Nairobi and dives into the evolution of her artwork from the smaller collaged paintings that centered her early practice as a university student in New York to her current multi-media projects that have grown in both scope and scale.

Whether a watercolor painting with photographic scraps or one of her mirror-faced figures encircled with fringe, Mutu's works are founded in an insistence on the value of all life and the ways the earth's history functions as a source of knowledge, which she explains:

I truly believe that there's something about taking these bits and pieces of trees, and animals and completely anonymous but extremely identifiable items and placing them somewhere that draws their energy, wherever they were coming from, whatever they did, whatever molten lava they came out of a million years ago, that is now in my work and that little piece of energy is magnified.

Dive further into Mutu's practice by watching the full documentary above, and see a decades-long archive of her paintings, sculptures, collages, and other works on Artsy and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member and support independent arts publishing. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, help support our interview series, gain access to partner discounts, and much more. Join now!

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A Visit to Wangechi Mutu's Nairobi Studio Explores Her Profound Ties to Nature and the Feminine

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Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu made history in 2019 when her four bronze sculptures became the first ever to occupy the niches of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's facade. Stretching nearly seven feet, the seated quartet evokes images of heavily adorned African queens and intervenes in the othe

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A Study in Occultism: The Art of Jean Delville

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A Study in Occultism: The Art of Jean Delville

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The Belgian Idealist sought to depict the elevation of the human spirit in his art, believing that the defiance of base desires could lead to spiritual enlightenment.

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The Belgian Idealist sought to depict the elevation of the human spirit in his art, believing that the defiance of base desires could lead to spiritual enlightenment.

Jean Delville, Self Portrait, 1887, Unknown Collection

Viewers of art often derive their own interpretations and meanings from the pieces that hang before them. At times, speculations on what the artist was trying to say, are exactly that - speculation - and bear no reflection on what the creator's actual artistic intentions or motivations were for picking up the paintbrush. It is a common practice, which at times is not unlike staring at a page of text written in a foreign language and exacting an arbitrary translation, then telling those around oneself that the translation is indeed accurate. The truth is that there are some painters who simply paint what they feel, and any profoundly detailed interpretation is, by nature, inaccurate. Then, in contrast, there are other painters that have something very specific to express through their brushstrokes, whether the viewer realizes it or not. This is exemplified in pieces created from the core beliefs of the artist. And if one knows what those core beliefs are, interpretation becomes both easier and more accurate. One of those artists whose paintings are easier to interpret when delving into the spirituality of their creator, is Belgium-born symbolist painter, poet, Theosophist, and occultist, Jean Delville.

Jean Delville led the Belgian idealist movement in the 1890s and believed that art should be representative of a higher spiritual truth, expressed through the ideal, through a beauty indicative of belief. And while Delville discussed his spiritual beliefs frequently and openly, he was rather reticent when it came to discussing his paintings, preferring for the viewer themselves to form their own interpretation. Somewhat ironically, the clues needed to interpret their painter's motivations, and subsequently the painting's 'true' meaning, are hidden in plain sight.

Mysteriosa or The Portrait of Mrs. Stuart Merrill, 1892, pencil, pastel and coloured pencil on paper, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

Perhaps Jean Delville's most well-known painting, Mysteriosa or The Portrait of Mrs. Stuart Merrill is a simplistically composed, albeit fascinating piece. A young, fiery-headed medium clutches a leatherbound black book, its cover inscribed with only a simple triangle, her eyes tilted up as if they are about to disappear completely into the back of her head in a trance-like state. The triangle is representative of Delville's belief in the idea of 'perfect human knowledge' attained through occult practices, and the technique used in making the subject's hair seem to radiate and bleed into the space around her shows that Mrs. Merrill is indeed transcending into a plane that is not that of the still-breathing mortal. The slender hands that clutch the book are pale and almost spectral, hinting at the divine power hidden within its pages. While little is known of Mrs. Stuart Merrill herself, her husband was a Symbolist poet who had works published in Paris and Brussels. The painting's air of mystery had led it to be sometimes referred to as the 'Mona Lisa of the 1890s.'

In the early stages of his artistic career, Delville was influenced by the writings and teachings of such renowned esotericists and occultists as Éliphas Lévi and Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, and later by Theosophists such as Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant. Great emphasis on the theme of the transfiguration of the soul toward a higher purpose is evident throughout his work. Delville believed that the true purpose of man was to seek spiritual enlightenment, and that the base desires, such as sexual pleasure, the attainment of power, and the accumulation of wealth, all kept mankind from achieving that enlightenment. This ideology is evident in his 1895 painting, Sathan's Treasures (Les Trésors de Sathan).

Sathan's Treasures (Les Trésors de Sathan), 1895, oil on canvas, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

At first glance, Sathan's Treasures appears to be simply a fantasy piece. A devil or demon cavorts above a stream of nude figures, against the backdrop of a mystical undersea land. And even though that may in fact be what the piece depicts, there is more to the painting than meets the eye. The unclothed figures represent the base nature of mankind, those carnal desires we all possess, and which subsequently come under the jurisdiction of Satan. The Great Deceiver has lured these souls away from the path of enlightenment, and into his underwater lair. Here, they are his 'treasure,' hence the painting's title. Delville expressed his belief in these sentiments in an 1893 article, published in the journal Le Mouvement Littéraire:

"Erotic fever has sterilized most minds. One ordinarily thinks of himself as virile because he satisfies a woman's unquenched bestial desires. Well, that's where the great shame of the cerebral degeneration of our time starts..."

L'Homme-Dieu (Man-God), 1903, oil on canvas, Groeninge Museum, Bruges

Composed strikingly in a palette of pastel colors, Delville's L'Homme-Dieu simply depicts the process of apotheosis. In the painting's lowest third, its subjects are preoccupied with the animalistic aspects of existence, in the throes of copulation, pain, childbirth, and the like. This morphs into the second third of the painting, the subjects here raising their hands to the heavens, seeking wisdom and enlightenment to be imparted upon them. And once it has, and they have truly understood the spiritual truth of the universe, they can then transcend into a god-like being themselves, all-knowing from where they stand on the highest point of the spiritual ladder. This makes up the uppermost part of the painting. L'Homme-Dieu was painted when Delville's interest in Theosophy increased, the religion's followers believing that men, through a process of spiritual enlightenment, can become spiritual masters, similar to the beliefs of the Buddhists.

Jean Delville died in Brussels, Belgium, on January 19, 1953, at the age of 86. And even though he was a driving force in the Belgian idealist movement, he never quite achieved the same fame as his contemporaries. A large part of this was simply due to the fact that he wasn't interested in doing so. While many Belgian Idealist artists exhibited their work within the highly commercialized exhibition societies, Delville never did so - simply because of his beliefs. Materialistic and monetary gain were not conducive while slowly and steadily travelling up the path of enlightenment. In fact, they were quite the opposite. He believed that art should be used as tool in which to educate society, a beauty created for posterity. He once summed up the sentiment perfectly in his writings:

"There will be nothing to prevent art increasingly to become an educative force in society, conscious of its mission. It is time to penetrate society with art, with the ideal and with beauty. Today's society tends to fall increasingly into instinct. It is saturated with materialism, sensualism and ... commercialism."

Which unfortunately sounds like it could be referring to a time similar to that in which we currently live in, and most-likely always will.

For more on auctions, exhibitions, and current trends, visit our Magazine Page

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A Study in Occultism: The Art of Jean Delville

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Jean Delville, Self Portrait, 1887, Unknown Collection Viewers of art often derive their own interpretations and meanings from the pieces that hang before them. At times, speculations on what the artist was trying to say, are exactly that - speculation - and bear no reflection on what the creator's actual artistic intentions or motivations were for picking up the paintbrush.

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Dame Paula Rego is a London-based Portuguese visual artist who is celebrated for her influence on modern figurative painting in Britain and Portugal. Her contemporary paintings and prints convey feminist counter-narratives interlaced with references to Portuguese folk culture and children's stories.

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Often drawing on her own life experiences, Rego's enveloping paintings unabashedly tackle political themes such as patriarchal violence, misogyny, social inequality, mental health, illness, and loss of life.

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The incredible story of how an inconspicuous janitor gained posthumous fame for his life’s oeuvre, and became one of the leaders of outsider art.

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The incredible story of how an inconspicuous janitor gained posthumous fame for his life's oeuvre, and became one of the leaders of outsider art.

Spangled Blengins. Boy King Islands. One is a young Tuskerhorian the other a human headed Dortherean, undated, Watercolour, pencil, and cut-and-pasted printed paper on paper, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Henry Darger was a hospital janitor from Chicago. He lived in a second-floor rented room in the Lincoln Park section of the city, until he moved into St. Augustine's Home for the Aged. Ostensibly, he was just another poverty-stricken old man who kept to himself. Until shortly before his death in 1973, when his landlord and notable Chicagoan photographer, Nathan Lerner, discovered Darger 's unbelievably vast and impressive oeuvre, which included thousands of pages of writing and hundreds of paintings. This fortuitous unearthing of the recluse's work is the only reason the artistically minded public knows of the man today, and why Darger's work has become one of the most poignant and celebrated examples of outsider art.

The artistic world of Henry Darger is one that is immensely ambivalent. Idyllic depictions of little girls in vales of wildflowers lead one unknowingly into fields of blood and the most visceral carnage. It is a world that is both endearing and repulsive, a world that was always intended to stay a complete secret.

At Norma Catherine via Jennie Richee witness childrens bowels..., undated, watercolour and pencil on paper, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Darger's childhood was plagued with hardship and tragedy. He was born in the Windy City in 1892 and lost his mother to complications during the birth of his younger sister when he was not even four years of age. The new-born child was put up for adoption, leaving Henry with his ailing father, until, not being able to be sufficiently cared for, he was sent to a Catholic home for boys. Here, he soon earned the nickname "Crazy", due to the fact that he often made unusual gestures with his arms and emitted strange sounds with his mouth. When he was 12 years old, he was examined by doctors and sent to the Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Illinois. The institution implemented forced child labor, and severe punishments were executed on any child who stepped too far out of line.

At Mc Calls run. Hands of fire, undated, watercolor, pencil, and ink on paper, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The one way in which young Henry could escape his misery-wracked childhood, was to fall headfirst into a world of imagination. Storybooks were always a welcome gift from his father, and Henry spent what little pocket money he acquired on paints. He would spend hours staring out of the front window, watching the winter snow fall outside. This proclivity of living in fictional or imaginative worlds was something that stayed with Darger all his life. So did the sense that children invariably suffered at the hands of adults - especially strangers. Together, these formed part of the drive for the creation of Darger's magnum opus, a 15,145-page manuscript with hundreds of accompanying illustrations, named In the Realms of the Unreal. Darger was also deeply touched and inspired by a photograph of Elsie Paroubek, a five-year-old girl who was kidnapped and murdered in 1911. The newspaper-clipped picture of little Elsie went beyond mere inspiration and bordered on an obsession for Darger. He was distraught when he eventually lost the photograph, and despite earnest endeavors, was never able to source another.

Henry's father died when he was seventeen, and after several unsuccessful attempts, he managed to escape from the misery of the asylum and make his way back to Chicago. It was during this time period that Darger first found work as a hospital janitor, and also when he first began composing his manuscript.

Untitled, undated, watercolour and pencil on paper, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

In the Realms of the Unreal is a surreal and epic fantasy, that follows 'the Vivian girls' - seven princesses who assist in a rebellion against child slavery. Darger created panoramic battle scenes using paper from magazines and coloring books. The Vivian girls were often accompanied by their cohorts - a battalion of naked prepubescent girls who strangely possessed male genitalia. These battle scenes are often especially violent, with images of evisceration, decapitation, and crucifixion. These panoramas of utter brutality and unrelenting slaughter, after the tranquility of skipping ropes and fields of wildflowers, are a significant reason why Darger's work is so potent. His masterfully executed dynamics, alongside his all-too-real understanding of the fragility of human life, render his pieces superlatively visceral.

Photograph of Darger, taken by David Berglund in 1971

During his life of seclusion, Darger was a passionate collector of ephemera, including comic books, magazines and newspapers, and picture cards of Catholic saints. This tendency to collect and hoard, meant that he had a near-endless supply of inspiration and access to create his work. He traced from comic books, clipped pictures of soldiers from magazines, and took source images to the local drug store so the photography counter could make enlargements. The result was that Darger's work was eclectic, and very much ahead of its time.

a) At Jennie Richee the Blengins stay under shelter b) Lightning strikes the crazy outfit again, undated, watercolor, pencil, and ink on paper, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Darger worked primarily in watercolor when he painted, his delicate palette is rich in flower-petal pastels, exhibiting innate skill. He would often balance two or three bright shades against darker tones and monochromatic colors, creating an underlying malevolence that lurked in the background, and threatened to overwhelm his subjects completely - which it invariably did only a few panels away.

Darger worked with a fevered passion, an indisputable earnestness, with a palette both tender and violent, leaving one unsettled and ambivalent. Was Darger simply a lonely old man, or did something much darker lurk inside of him? We will never truly know, but, as Darger himself wrote in 1950: " The world needs a narrative. " He took that one step further, narrating his own world. A world we are very privileged and exceptionally lucky to be able to even peek inside of today.

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Spangled Blengins. Boy King Islands. One is a young Tuskerhorian the other a human headed Dortherean, undated, Watercolour, pencil, and cut-and-pasted printed paper on paper, The Museum of Modern Art, New York Henry Darger was a hospital janitor from Chicago. He lived in a second-floor rented room in the Lincoln Park section of the city, until he moved into St.

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The Georgian era saw the rise in a jewelry trend that's equally sentimental and peculiar: to remember spouses who had died or to honor clandestine affairs without revealing anyone's identity, people would commission tiny renderings of a person's eye to be painted on broaches, rings, and other accessories they could carry with them. Similar to a lock of hair or portrait hidden in a locket, the abstracted feature was anonymous and indiscernible to most but deeply personal to the wearer.

Robyn Rich evokes this centuries-old fad with a substantial body of work that nestles minuscule oil paintings into cutlery, tins, and other antique vessels. "With a love of reusing and recycling, the found objects I use give a simple and often nostalgic canvas, which offers little distraction, allowing the beauty of the eye to be the focus," she says. "These objects that we use every day are often taken for granted, overlooked, and forgotten, but in my work, they have another life and help tell a story."

Whether centered on the eyes, nose, or lips, each realistic snippet conveys a wide range of human emotions-the expressive works capture everything from surprise and worry to contentment-through a single, isolated feature. "I paint friends, total strangers, and the eyes from painted portraits from the past. Each eye I paint becomes a little part of me," the Frankston, Australia-based artist says.

Alongside her ongoing series of works on domestic objects, Rich is currently collaborating with designer Kelty Pelechytik on a collection of custom wearables. She also has an upcoming solo show at fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne. Titled I See You, the exhibition is the culmination of a call Rich put out in 2019 for women and female-identifying people to share their portraits and stories with her, resulting in more than 100 pieces that will be on view this October. Until then, find an extensive archive of her miniatures on Instagram.

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Single Eyes Gaze Out of Antique Cutlery, Tins, and Other Objects in Miniature Paintings by Robyn Rich

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The Georgian era saw the rise in a jewelry trend that's equally sentimental and peculiar: to remember spouses who had died or to honor clandestine affairs without revealing anyone's identity, people would commission tiny renderings of a person's eye to be painted on broaches, rings, and other access

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Curator Massimiliano Gioni on the Uncanny Power of Contemporary Figurative Sculpture

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Curator Massimiliano Gioni on the Uncanny Power of Contemporary Figurative Sculpture

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On the occasion of "The Great Mother" and Phaidon's new book Body of Art, Artspace's Karen Rosenberg spoke to Gioni about the enduring appeal of figurative sculpture, his influences from Catholic church statues to Mike Kelley, and why he thinks this art form is especially vital today.

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The star curator Massimiliano Gioni is known for opening up hidden worlds and alternative histories, but in one respect his shows are surprisingly traditional: they include rich concentrations of eerily realistic figurative sculpture. The genre was unavoidable in Gioni's 1990s-themed surveys "Ostalgia" and " NYC 1993" and in last year's solo of the sculptor Pawel Althamer, to name a few recent examples from the , where Gioni is associate director and director of exhibitions. It's also omnipresent in his current show "The Great Mother" at Milan's Palazzo Reale (through November 15), a sweeping overview of maternal imagery in 20th-century art produced for the Expo in Città 2015 under the auspices of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi.

On the occasion of "The Great Mother" and 's new book Body of Art, Artspace's Karen Rosenberg spoke to Gioni about the enduring appeal of figurative sculpture, his influences from Catholic church statues to Mike Kelley, and why he thinks this art form is especially vital today.
Click here to learn more about Phaidon's Body of Art and buy the book. There's been a lot of talk recently about a resurgence of the figure in contemporary sculpture. Some of the most high-profile pieces in the New Museum's Triennial last spring were figurative sculptures, and now a large gallery in MoMA P.S. 1's "Greater New York" is dedicated to the genre. Why do you think the body is coming back into sculpture?
I don't know if it's coming back-for me, art has been about bodies looking at bodies from approximately 35,000 years ago until today. From the beginning of time, we have made sculptures and objects to represent each other and to represent people whom we're about to lose. The Romans made death masks to preserve the images of people they loved. It's not so much that there is a return to figuration, it's just that figuration is the territory in which many of the fundamental preoccupations of art are expressed.
That's true. But many artists are making a kind of figurative sculpture that feels new and transgressive, even though they're using forms and techniques associated with academic realism. I'm talking about Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy, Maurizio Cattelan, Robert Gober, and Jeff Koons, among others. You've exhibited all of those artists; can you explain what makes them look so contemporary?
I think it's most obvious in the work of Ray, an artist who's looking at a whole tradition that goes back to Greek sculpture, but who works with new materials and in a way that makes his sculpture look Martian, otherworldly.

That's another reason for my physical fascination with a certain type of figurative sculpture. There is a sensation which Freud called the "uncanny" and Mike Kelley explored in his famous exhibition of the same title, the feeling of being faced with certain sculptures that occupy the same space as us and yet somehow feel completely from another dimension. That's what makes some of this contemporary figurative sculpture so interesting-it foregrounds this experience of inhabiting our own space and at the same time offers access to another space and time. Kelley's exhibition was a big influence on me, both as a curator and an art lover.
What was it about "The Uncanny," the show-within-a-show that Kelley organized for the Sonsbeek '93 exhibition in the Netherlands, that had such a profound effect on you?
It was an exhibition of figurative sculpture, and particularly polychrome, hyperrealistic sculpture. Much of my taste has been formed by those objects-and maybe also because as a young Italian Catholic, I was used to seeing sculpture as polychrome and extremely realistic.

Figurative sculpture of that type is also particularly interesting to me because it's not just meant to be contemplated. It's meant to be felt and to have an effect on the viewer. Think of the thousands of crucifixes and Pietàs in Italian churches-those are sculptures that are meant to have a specific effect. We think of the history of art as the history of forms and styles-very seldom do we think of it as the history of pictures that do something to people.

There's a beautiful book by David Friedberg called The Power of Images that looks at the history of art as the history of images that do something to people. He looks at pornographic images; he looks at sacred images that are meant to facilitate a reaction in the church. Figurative sculpture makes this transitive effect of art more explicit. It's not just meant to be looked at and contemplated rationally.
That transitive power of figurative sculpture has sometimes been a liability. Historically, or in literature at least, very realistic sculptures of the female body have tended to elicit erotic responses. Think of the Pygmalion myth, or the Aphrodite by Praxiteles.
What you are saying immediately makes me think of cultures that don't allow representations of bodies. There are many throughout art history, and they are not necessarily associated with certain religious agendas. You mentioned the myth of Pygmalion, and there are many other myths. They confirm something magical in the art of representing people.

On the other hand, figurative sculpture is by definition populist. I always think it's quite significant that one of the most attended shows of the recent past was the "Bodies" exhibition [of preserved human cadavers], which says a lot about our taste. Irony aside, figurative sculpture is to a certain extent not recognized intellectually-it is deemed too popular, too basic. That's what makes it more interesting to me. It's not only the context in which art was invented, and the place where we negotiate death and missing people, but it's also a form that's open and popular. It can bring together Bernini and the "Bodies" exhibition. There's an inclusiveness that interests and fascinates me.
Do you think technology is also a factor in the reception of these sculptures? Our relationship to space and to the body, to our own bodies, has changed so much in the past few decades.
Maybe looking at these sculptures is a way to compensate for the de-materialized experience that we have every day now. We are so exposed to technology that some of these figurative sculptures become more relevant, because they require a physical experience. Some of the artists you mentioned-a wide spectrum, from Althamer, who works with extremely modest materials, to Koons, who works with the most industrial and sophisticated materials-share this transformative experience of space. You feel your body differently in the face of these figurative sculptures.

I think it's particularly evident in the work of Ray, because the way his sculptures affect the body of the viewer is quite extraordinary. They make you feel different. It's an almost therapeutic aspect of figurative sculpture today-it activates a series of muscles, metaphorically and not, which have been weakened by our daily experience.
So you think that figurative sculptures serve a different purpose today than ancient figurative sculpture did in its own time?
Probably, yes. They make us come to terms with physicality, in a way that in ancient times and probably even in the 1970s was not the same. If I think of the '70s, it was less of a figurative time-I can think of bodies in videos, but not in sculptures.
Let's talk a bit about "The Great Mother." How did you choose to focus on the mother figure, as a way of telling the story of 20th-century art?
The theme of the Expo was nutrition, and I was trying to find a theme that was somehow related to the topic but also would allow me to go more into depth. An exhibition about motherhood emerged from the idea of nourishment and primordial food. It's about looking at the 20 th century from a different perspective, through a theme that is intimately connected to the history of art.

The very first human-made object is a depiction of a woman, and a woman who's probably pregnant-the famous Venus of Willendorf sculpture. From the very beginning, the illustration of maternity and art are entangled.
How did you bring this ancient image of the fertility figure into a show of 20th-century sculpture?
It's not so much an update-it's a survey of representations of mother's bodies and women's bodies. The starting point of the exhibition is Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" and the work of the Jung collaborator Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, who amassed a gigantic archive of more than 350 images of women-goddesses.

Then the exhibition moves on to look at the way in which avant-garde movements such as Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism dealt with the representation of women and the representation of mothers. Some interesting things emerge: movements we always imagine as progressive are revealed as extremely misogynist and built on 19 th-century values.

The last part of the show, which starts off with Louise Bourgeois, looks at how feminist art has both embraced and criticized certain representations of motherhood, and how it's often gone back to myths of goddesses and mother figures to reappropriate power.
What are some pivotal examples of figurative sculpture from the show?
One thing I enjoy is looking at objects that might not be read as figurative or illustrative, but change our perspective so that they do. For example, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain doesn't appear to be figurative. But at the time of its realization, it was described as "a Madonna of the bathroom." When you put it in the context of this exhibition, suddenly it looks like a womb with a strange digestive or reproductive tube sticking out of it. The exhibition is full of examples of this switch in perspective.

A central figure in the show is Bourgeois; she connects to both Surrealism and Paleolithic sculpture, and she imagines an anti-patriarchal form of art. One of her most famous pieces is called The Destruction of the Father, and the collection of her writing has the same title. She's also an artist for whom abstraction and figuration become two ends of the same spectrum.
It's difficult to think of major female artists since the 1970s who work with figurative sculpture in the way of a Charles Ray or a Paul McCarthy, although I can think of many celebrated female artists who have used the body in installation and performance art. Why do you think that is?
It's a big question-again, it goes back to the Venus of Willendorf. Adrienne Rich, who wrote this beautiful book Of Women Born, which was one of the books that kept me company as I was preparing "The Great Mother," says that we have evidence that the pregnant woman was at the center of some sacred belief-she was recognized for her power. But she also says that have no idea whether those representations were made by men or by women, and that is a crucial question. We do know that, for centuries after, it was mostly men making these representations.

I think that at one point in the recent history of contemporary art, women artists decided to represent their bodies in ways that differ radically from the representations that preceded them. A lot of feminist work is body-centric through performance. In the 1970s, the more militant or political feminist artists decided that it was time to bypass the problem of representation-they refused to be represented, and they presented themselves in the flesh.
Like "The Great Mother," Body of Art takes a wide-angle view of art history; the Venus of Willendorf is there, and so is Joan Jonas's Mirror Check. What are some of the challenges of assembling this kind of survey?
Great art is about making us understand how we live and exist in our own bodies, and this show lent itself to understanding that the representation of bodies is often political. I don't mean to say this critically, but it's a criticism that is often addressed to my shows: Whenever we look at the body, it's easy to think of it as universal. What we have learned from feminist and postmodernist thinking is that every body is a cultural construction. There's no such thing as a "universal" body. When people look at figurative sculptures they tend to fall for that assumption.

Having a non-chronological structure can also be dangerous. If we make books or shows to prove that everything is the same, we're in trouble. But if we make them to stress the differences, through juxtapositions, that's when things start getting interesting.

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Curator Massimiliano Gioni on the Uncanny Power of Contemporary Figurative Sculpture

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The star curator Massimiliano Gioni is known for opening up hidden worlds and alternative histories, but in one respect his shows are surprisingly traditional: they include rich concentrations of eerily realistic figurative sculpture.

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My Body of Art - New Museum Exhibitions Director Massimiliano Gioni on the Venus of Willendorf

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My Body of Art - New Museum Exhibitions Director Massimiliano Gioni on the Venus of Willendorf

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The curator and Phaidon author tells Artspace what he sees in this ancient European fertility sculpture

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The Venus of Willendorf (22,000 - 24,000 BC). As reproduced in Body of Art

The curator and Phaidon author tells Artspace what he sees in this ancient European fertility sculpture
Curator Massimiliano Gioni is an Italian man who spends a lot of time thinking about women. Nothing new in that you might say, but the women preoccupying Gioni's working day most recently have been artistic symbols of fertility and motherhood - often viewed from a feminist perspective.

The Phaidon author's latest show, The Great Mother, runs until November at Milan's Palazzo Reale and, in a new and fascinating interview with Artspace, he discusses and analyses the presence and iconography of motherhood in art.

"The very first human-made object is a depiction of a woman, and a woman who's probably pregnant - the famous Venus of Willendorf sculpture," he says. "From the very beginning, the illustration of maternity and art are entangled."

The clay figurine is one of the oldest surviving examples of Paleolithic, prehistoric art dating back to 24000-22000BC. The exaggerated features of her breasts, thighs and pubic area lead art historians to believe she must be a symbol of fertility. (They named her 'Venus' after the Roman goddess of love and fertility and 'Willendorf' the Austrian town in which the sculpture was found.) Gioni goes on to say "we have evidence that the pregnant woman was at the centre of some sacred belief - she was recognized for her power."

As Body of Art reveals, the Venus of Willendorf was found in 1908 on the site of a nomadic settlement on the banks of the river Danube in Austria, but would have been brought from elsewhere, as the oolitic limestone from which it is made does not occur locally. There were never any feet and the figure cannot stand independently, but unlike most Venuses it does possess hands, which rest above the pendulous breasts. Venus figurines like this held a fascination in the early twentieth century for Pablo Picasso, who kept replicas in his studio."

In the interview Gioni also mentions the work of Louise Bourgeois, another artist who referenced the Venus of Willendorf and who also features in Body of Art "She looks at how feminist art has both embraced and criticized certain representations of motherhood, and how it's often gone back to myths of goddesses and mother figures to reappropriate power. She connects to both Surrealism and Paleolithic sculpture, and she imagines an anti-patriarchal form of art," Gioni says. This can be seen in one of her pieces called Nature Study 1999 which bears some similarities to the Venus of Willendorf. The dog-like creature with a large muscly body and sharp claws suggests power and aggression, illuminating it's defensive and maternal instinct. The six breasts indicate her nurturing and caring role as a mother yet also draw attention to the blurring of gender boundaries and the ambiguous sexuality of the creature.

Gioni concludes the interview by tying the threads of his thoughts into an appealingly neat bow. "Great art is about making us understand how we live and exist in our own bodies. Whenever we look at the body, it's easy to think of it as universal. What we have learned from feminist and postmodernist thinking is that every body is a cultural construction. There's no such thing as a "universal" body. When people look at figurative sculptures they tend to fall for that assumption." You can read the full Artspace interview here.

For similar bodily insight, go here to read about Joel Meyerowitz's take on his beach photos; here for Bill Arning's views on Peter Hujar's photographs; here for Zhang Huan on his great work To Add One Metre To An Anonymous Mountain; and to gain greater understanding of the Body in Art and plenty more besides, buy a copy of Body of Art here.

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My Body of Art - New Museum Exhibitions Director Massimiliano Gioni on the Venus of Willendorf

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The curator and Phaidon author tells Artspace what he sees in this ancient European fertility sculpture Curator Massimiliano Gioni is an Italian man who spends a lot of time thinking about women. Nothing new in that you might say, but the women preoccupying Gioni's working day most recently have been artistic symbols of fertility and motherhood - often viewed from a feminist perspective.

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“The hippie dream was coming to an end.” Watch American artist Fred Tomaselli – who adds elements such as pot and pills to his work – discuss the impact psychedelic drugs had on his art and how it reflects escapism while still commenting on reality. Read less ...

“Every night at nine o’clock Tinker Bell would fly across the sky amidst the fireworks.” Tomaselli considers Southern California – in which he grew up close to Disney Land – to be “the vanguard of the culture of the unreal.” He started using elements from Disney Land and other theme parks in his art as a means to comment on escapism – something that was quite unpopular at the time, where art was about the opposite – truth: “When I was at school, the idea of making escapist art was the worst thing you could do.” To Tomaselli, however, the very concept of escapism was an important part of the culture he was a product of, and he wanted to look at that phenomenon as art.

Psychedelic drugs and the psychedelic experience played a large part in Tomaselli’s work. The sense of utopianism and altered perception, which the substances conjured up, were symptomatic of the postmodern time: “There was just a bunch of rubble of utopianism that I was waiting through as a young person, trying to figure out what was worth saving. How to perceive through this desolate landscape of dead ideology.” Too young to be a hippie himself, Tomaselli was faced with the sad aftermath: “Those substances recall those dead utopias. And that was the dead utopia that I had immediately inherited.”

“I like the window that becomes the mirror that becomes the window again.” Though Tomaselli acknowledges that his art does indeed contain escapist elements, he feels that it is not purely “escapist art,” as it always reflects the world back to the viewer.

Fred Tomaselli (b. 1956) is an American artist. His paintings include medical herbs, prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants alongside clips from books and magazines, creating a collage suspended in gleaming layers of clear, polished, hard resin. Tomaselli has held solo exhibitions at venues such as James Cohan Gallery and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, White Cube in London, Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Site Santa Fee in New Mexico and Albright-Knox Gallery of Art in Buffalo, New York. His work can be found in the public collections of prominent venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Fred Tomaselli was interviewed by Kasper Bech Dyg at his studio in New York City in November 2014.

Camera: Klaus Elmer
Produced and edited by: Kasper Bech Dyg
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2015
Produced by the Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark

https://vimeo.com/146757619
Supported by Nordea-fonden

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“The hippie dream was coming to an end.” Watch American artist Fred Tomaselli – who adds elements such as pot and pills to his work – discuss the impact psychedelic drugs had on his art and how it reflects escapism while still commenting on reality. 

“Every night at nine o’clock Tinker Bell would fly across the sky amidst the fireworks.” Tomaselli considers Southern California – in which he grew up close to Disney Land – to be “the vanguard of the culture of the unreal.” He started using elements from Disney Land and other theme parks in his art as a means to comment on escapism – something that was quite unpopular at the time, where art was about the opposite – truth: “When I was at school, the idea of making escapist art was the worst thing you could do.” To Tomaselli, however, the very concept of escapism was an important part of the culture he was a product of, and he wanted to look at that phenomenon as art. 

Psychedelic drugs and the psychedelic experience played a large part in Tomaselli’s work. The sense of utopianism and altered perception, which the substances conjured up, where symptomatic of the postmodern time: “There was just a bunch of rubble of utopianism that I was waiting through as a young person, trying to figure out what was worth saving. How to perceive through this desolate landscape of dead ideology.” Too young to be a hippie himself, Tomaselli was faced with the sad aftermath: “Those substances recall those dead utopias. And that was the dead utopia that I had immediately inherited.”

“I like the window that becomes the mirror that becomes the window again.” Though Tomaselli acknowledges that his art does indeed contain escapist elements, he feels that it is not purely “escapist art,” as it always reflects the world back to the viewer. 

Fred Tomaselli (b. 1956) is an American artist. His paintings include medical herbs, prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants alongside clips from books and magazines, creating a collage suspended in gleaming layers of clear, polished, hard resin. Tomaselli has held solo exhibitions at venues such as James Cohan Gallery and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, White Cube in London, Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Site Santa Fee in New Mexico and Albright-Knox Gallery of Art in Buffalo, New York. His work can be found in the public collections of prominent venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Fred Tomaselli was interviewed by Kasper Bech Dyg at his studio in New York City in November 2014. 

Camera: Klaus Elmer  
Produced and edited by: Kasper Bech Dyg 
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2015

Supported by Nordea-fonden

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Heracles and Omphale, 2017

The reverse archival pigment print

19 7/10 × 23 3/5 × 1 1/5 in

50 × 60 × 3 cm

Edition of 50 + 5AP

This work is part of a limited edition set.

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Working in oil and acrylic and at small- to mid-scale, Genieve Figgis produces paintings rich in color, texture, humor, and the macabre. Through her work, she explores and sends-up the idealization of luxury and leisure in paintings and photographs throughout art history. Like these historical works, her paintings feature sumptuous domestic interiors and stately country homes, idyllic natural settings, and protagonists dressed in finery and engaged in such activities as feasting, horseback riding, playing piano, or attending a party. Figgis's body of work also includes her take on the tradition of portraiture and the odalisque. In her compositions, however, all is not well. Her figures appear either faceless or as foolishly grinning, ghoul-like creatures, whose loosely rendered forms seem vulnerable and insubstantial as they merge with their lushly painted, semi-abstract surroundings.

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Genieve Figgis | Heracles and Omphale (2017) | Available for Sale | Artsy

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Working in oil and acrylic and at small- to mid-scale, Genieve Figgis produces paintings rich in color, texture, humor, and the macabre. Through her work, she explores and sends-up the idealization of luxury and leisure in paintings and photographs throughout art history.

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Paula Rego (b. 1935), Baa, Baa, Black Sheep from Nursery Rhymes. Etching and aquatint, 1989. © Paula Rego. Reproduced by permission of the artist.

Paula Rego’s Nursery Rhymes offer a gothic twist on familiar stories and explores the underlying horror and sexual menace of tales originally intended for children. Rego uses these commonly known stories as the framework for her imagined scenes, bringing out their hidden darkness.

In this case the ‘black sheep’ has become a towering ram seated to embrace a pubescent girl, who in turn gestures to a figure behind the ram’s back (possibly the ‘little boy’ of the song) hinting at a strange love triangle.

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Paula Rego established an early reputation with her surreal ...

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Paula Rego established an early reputation with her surreal ...

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centheigshs.eq.edu.au

Rego,

Paula,

Pastel,

Celestina,

Draws,

Pictured,

Established,

Surreal,

Characters,

Etchings,

Centheigshs.eq.edu.au

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Paula Rego established an early reputation with her surreal ...

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Paula Rego established an early reputation with her surreal Read more about rego, paula, pastel, celestina, draws and pictured.

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Artist:

Paula Rego

(British/Portuguese, born 1935)

Title:

Pendle Witches (set of 12)

, 1996

Medium:

etchings and aquatints

Size:

70 x 54.7 cm. (27.6 x 21.5 in.)

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Paula Rego

Pendle Witches (set of 12), 1996

70 x 54.7 cm. (27.6 x 21.5 in.)

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(British/Portuguese, born 1935)

Title:

, 1996

Medium:

etchings and aquatints

Size:

70 x 54.7 cm. (27.6 x 21.5 in.)

Edition:

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Paula Rego Pendle Witches (set of 12), 1996 70 x 54.7 cm. (27.6 x 21.5 in.) close Artist: (British/Portuguese, born 1935) Title: , 1996 Medium: etchings and aquatints Size: 70 x 54.7 cm. (27.6 x 21.5 in.)

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"Witches at their Incantations after Salvator Rosa", 1991

Etching and aquatint on paper

Edition 6/13 + 1AP

This work is part of a limited edition set.

29.5x44.5 cm (mancha/image)
Print

Signature

Signed and numbered 6/13 AP

Paula Rego
Portuguese, b. 1935
A “painter of stories” celebrated for her dark, complex paintings, prints, drawings, and collages, Paula Rego draws upon folk- and fairytales, literature, and her own biography to create politically charged, deeply unsettling tableaux. Her forceful compositions are imbued with cruelty—both subtle and overt—and permeated with a sense of unease and ambiguity. Foregrounding women and girls, and often using animals as stand-ins for humans, she depicts dysfunctional family relationships, political systems (like that of Portugal’s António de Oliveira Salazar), and social structures. Rego is fascinated by what she calls “the beautiful grotesque” in life and in art. As she describes: “It’s the divine, perhaps. […] I mean some other kind of divine, which connects very strongly to Portuguese folk tales and stories—the strength of them and, very often, the enormous cruelty involved. The cruelty is fascinating.”

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Paula Rego | "Witches at their Incantations after Salvator Rosa" (1991) | Artsy

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A "painter of stories" celebrated for her dark, complex paintings, prints, drawings, and collages, Paula Rego draws upon folk- and fairytales, literature, and her own biography to create politically charged, deeply unsettling tableaux. Her forceful compositions are imbued with cruelty-both subtle and overt-and permeated with a sense of unease and ambiguity.

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Straw Burning 1996
ARTIST Paula Rego born 1935

PART OF Pendle Witches

MEDIUM Etching and aquatint on paper

DIMENSIONS Image: 452 × 297 mm

COLLECTION Tate

ACQUISITION Purchased 1997

REFERENCE P77907

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Paula Rego: Pendle Witches and Other Prints

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Paula Rego: Pendle Witches and Other Prints

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Although she has lived in England for many years, [Paula Rego] was born in Lisbon, and her work is often drenched with Mediterranean menace. Solidly built women with Latino features find themselves in the midst of fantastical horrors. In Flood (above), a woman is cast adrift in a basin, the rising waters swirling around her full of flotsam.

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Into the dark side of woman ; Visual arts

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Into the dark side of woman ; Visual arts

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The dark recesses of Catholicism and heresy also inform the work of [ANA MARIA PACHECO], who is from Brazil. Her screenprint series Hairy Legs of the Queen of Sheba suggests the traditional Christian disgust of female sexuality. The Queen's hairy nether regions imply her carnal and animalistic nature as well as being seen as the mark of the devil and providing possible evidence of witchcraft. While [PAULA REGO]'s figures are involved in aberrant games, there is a sneaking suspicion that they are actually rather enjoying them, whereas Pacheco's images hint at real cruelty and torture.

Strongly influenced by children's book illustrations and cartoons, [OONA GRIMES]'s series of etching and aquatints Downfall 1998 creates a wonderfully witty and aberrant infantile world full of bodily eruptions and explosions. Her more recent work, however, has a lighter touch. How Clever of God is a series of delicate drawings in gouache and ink that depict strange landscapes and biomorphic forms that suggest female genitaliaand fleshy aborted foetal forms. Their isolation in large areas of white ground only serves to heighten their sense of isolation and vulnerability.

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Paula Rego's enigmatic, unsettling works are inspired by narratives about human behavior in books, films, folk legend and fairy tales, as well as by memories of her childhood in Portugal. Above all, says Gillian Forrester, Yale's in-house curator for the exhibition, Rego confronts the experiences of women and their relationships, exploring themes of love and cruelty, desire and disgust, rebellion and domination.

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The last, Stone Soup, is a set of pen-and-watercolour drawings that illustrate a folk tale in which a starving girl tricks hard-hearted villagers into giving her fresh ingredients to supplement the rock she is boiling for broth.

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Unauthorized Collaboration: LAWGIVER (NEWTON), 2018

Altered oil painting

35 × 30 × 2 1/2 in

88.9 × 76.2 × 6.4 cm

Park Place Gallery

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Mel Chin | Unauthorized Collaboration: LAWGIVER (NEWTON) (2018) | Available for Sale | Artsy

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Available for sale from Park Place Gallery, Mel Chin, Unauthorized Collaboration: LAWGIVER (NEWTON) (2018), Altered oil painting, 35 × 30 × 2 1/2 in

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Head-Turning Historical Portraits by Ewa Juszkiewicz

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Head-Turning Historical Portraits by Ewa Juszkiewicz

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Ewa Juszkiewicz subverts the traditional notion of female portrait sitters as passive, simple subjects in her subtly unusual oil paintings. The artist constructs each painted portrait using familiar tropes from European art history, sometimes even citing specific paintings as inspiration. Female subjects with smooth, pale skin and luxurious apparel are placed in front of abstract or generically bucolic settings, sometimes with a “gender-appropriate” item in hand, like a paint brush, small book, or feather.

But in place of the beautiful face a viewer would expect in the center of these pleasant trappings, Juszkiewicz has turned the subject’s head 180 degrees to show an elaborate hairstyle, or filled the face with unruly plants or ribbons. A statement on the artist’s website explains, “Through the deconstruction of historical portraits, she undermines their constant, indisputable character and tries to influence the way we perceive them. Juszkiewicz experiments with the form of the female figure and face, balancing on the border between what is human and inhuman.”

The artist lives and works in Warsaw, Poland. She is represented by Galerie Rolando Anselmi in Berlin, where she will have a solo show on view in November and December, 2019. Juszkiewicz shares updates from her work and travels on Instagram.

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Ewa Juszkiewicz subverts the traditional notion of female portrait sitters as passive, simple subjects in her subtly unusual oil paintings. The artist constructs each painted portrait using familiar tropes from European art history, sometimes even citing specific paintings as inspiration. Female subjects with smooth, pale skin and luxurious apparel are placed in front of abstract or generically bucolic settings, sometimes with a "gender-appropriate" item in hand, like a paint brush, small book, or feather.

But in place of the beautiful face a viewer would expect in the center of these pleasant trappings, Juszkiewicz has turned the subject's head 180 degrees to show an elaborate hairstyle, or filled the face with unruly plants or ribbons. A statement on the artist's website explains, "Through the deconstruction of historical portraits, she undermines their constant, indisputable character and tries to influence the way we perceive them. Juszkiewicz experiments with the form of the female figure and face, balancing on the border between what is human and inhuman."

The artist lives and works in Warsaw, Poland. She is represented by Galerie Rolando Anselmi in Berlin, where she will have a solo show on view in November and December, 2019. Juszkiewicz shares updates from her work and travels on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member and support independent arts publishing. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, help support our interview series, gain access to partner discounts, and much more. Join now!

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Head-Turning Historical Portraits by Ewa Juszkiewicz

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Ewa Juszkiewicz subverts the traditional notion of female portrait sitters as passive, simple subjects in her subtly unusual oil paintings. The artist constructs each painted portrait using familiar tropes from European art history, sometimes even citing specific paintings as inspiration. Female sub

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Artnet's Cait Munro catches up with Fred Tomaselli in his studio to discuss his latest exhibition of New York Times pieces. Fred is showing at the James Cohan Gallery from May 1st – June 14th, 2014.

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Video portrait of artist Fred Tomaselli. Selections from the HD production of Art in Progress: Fred Tomaselli 2005.

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“All Artwork Is a Magical Act”: An Interview with Susan Aberth and Stacy Klein / Jennifer Johnson

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“All Artwork Is a Magical Act”: An Interview with Susan Aberth and Stacy Klein / Jennifer Johnson

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What follows below is an interview conducted by Jennifer Johnson, who co-created La Maga y el Maestro and Leonora’s World and plays Leonora in both performances, with Stacy Klein (with whom Johnson co-created the performances) and the art historian Susan Aberth, an expert in the work of Leonora Carrington who serves as an artistic consultant for the project. In this conversation, which has been adapted from the original transcription, the participants discuss Double Edge’s interest in Carrington and address the roles of magic in the living arts of the present. In particular, they address the exigency of Carrington’s ecofeminist ideas about ritual, visionary experience, and non-normative forms of knowledge and thought in the face of contemporary misogyny and the normalization of extremism and white supremacy.  What does it mean, they ask, to approach the life and work of Leonora Carrington as a way to “prioritize imagination in times of creative, emotional, spiritual and political uncertainty”— and thus as a figure central to the very mission of Double Edge Theatre?

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"All Artwork Is a Magical Act"
An Interview with Susan Aberth and Stacy Klein, by Jennifer Johnson

Founded in 1982, Double Edge Theatre is a collaborative, residential theater company located since 1994 on a former dairy farm in Western Massachusetts (on the ancestral lands of Mohican, Nipmuc, and Pocumtuc people). Approaching the farm from the village of Ashfield, where the company and its directors live and work, one first encounters a striking feature of the theater's training facility: a series of suspended cords, trapezes, and nets towering above a grassy field, which serves as an apparatus with which actors-and the many students who visit the farm for training-can practice "flying." Each year Double Edge Theatre hosts both indoor and outdoor performances at the farm, in addition to tours and performances, that integrate landscape and spectacle, intimate performance with live music and large-scale mythic storytelling replete with masks and pageantry, stilt walking and street theater, poetry and acrobatics. In the refurbished barn that serves as the ensemble's indoor theater, actors fly from the rafters, suspending themselves precariously from ribbons or bars; at various sites around the farm, actors fly through trees or suspend themselves high above the spectators. The effects are riveting: this is not carnival; it is magic.

An autonomous, wholly artist-run organization, Double Edge was founded in Boston as a feminist ensemble and a laboratory for experimental creative process, a mission that has evolved into a year-round ecosystem of collective living, farming and environmental education, rigorous theatrical training, and collaborative artistic and musical creation. The group's founder, Artistic Director Stacy Klein, began training in Poland in 1976 with actor Rena Mirecka, founding actor of Jerzy Grotowsky's Laboratory Theatre, while completing a BFA in directing; she would later complete a PhD in Theater while creating the first two women's theater festivals in the world in 1979 and 1980, in collaboration with Susie Chancey. The name Double Edge extends, Klein has explained, from the ensemble's first production, RITES, a modernization of the Bacchae of Euripides set in a woman's bathroom in London; the double-edged axe used in Bacchic sacrifices-the labrys-had likewise been taken up by the feminist theologian Mary Daly as part of the iconography of her work, and stands here for an instrument for combatting "isolation and erasure," part of the ensemble's core mission of art and social justice.

One of the operating principles of Double Edge Theatre-and a remarkably present aspect of any visit to the farm-is its fusion of vividly experimental theater with a resounding commitment to living culture, which (as the T heater's mission statement describes), refers to (cultural / economic / organizational / personal / political) work "created and sustained within an open, honest, meaningful, relevant shared experience."

Over the past two years, Double Edge Ensemble, led by Klein, along with Co-Artistic Directors and lead actors Jennifer Johnson, Carlos Uriona, and Matthew Glassman, as well as Producing Director Adam Bright, has developed a cycle of performances related to the life and work of polymath writer-artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), whose centenary in 2017 has led to a series of major exhibitions and the republication of Carrington's writing. Double Edge's first Carrington-related performance, Leonora & Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro, premiered at the Pea k Performance series a t Montclair State University in March 2018, and received rave reviews. The performance reimagines the artistic and spiritual encounter in 1960s Mexico City of the British-born surrealist and her mentorship of the Chilean-born filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, drawing upon autobiographical accounts by Jodorowsky and, in particular, animating the fantastic bestiary of Carrington's fictions and images. The cast thus features Johnson and Uriona as Carrington and Jodorowsky, respectively, but also ensemble actors Amanda Miller as the Pajaro (the parrot who figures in Carrington's 1977 novel The Stone Door), Travis Coe as a flying Hyena (from her 1939 short story "The Debutante"), Matthew Glassman and Adam Bright as part of her oft depicted kabbalistic trio and Hannah Jarrell as the Giantess (from her 1947 painting), among others. Double Edge followed La Maga y el Maestro with a site-specific outdoor spectacle, Leonora's World, performed at various sites around the farm; Leonora's World premiered in Fall 2018 and will be reprised as the company's fall spectacle this October 10-13.

What follows below is an interview conducted by Jennifer Johnson, who co-created La Maga y el Maestro and Leonora's World and plays Leonora in both performances, with Stacy Klein (with whom Johnson co-created the performances) and the art historian Susan Aberth, an expert in the work of Leonora Carrington who serves as an artistic consultant for the project. In this conversation, which has been adapted from the original transcription, the participants discuss Double Edge's interest in Carrington and address the roles of magic in the living arts of the present. In particular, they address the exigency of Carrington's ecofeminist ideas about ritual, visionary experience, and non-normative forms of knowledge and thought in the face of contemporary misogyny and the normalization of extremism and white supremacy. What does it mean, they ask, to approach the life and work of Leonora Carrington as a way to "prioritize imagination in times of creative, emotional, spiritual and political uncertainty"- and thus as a figure central to the very mission of Double Edge Theatre?

Upcoming touring dates for La Maga y el Maestro in 2020:

Boston, MA: Arts Emerson (Technical Residency)
February 24-28, 2020

Albuquerque, NM: Revolutions Festival
March 11-12, 2020

Orange, CA: Musco Arts Center
March 18, 2020

Detroit, MI: The Hinterlands' Assemblage
April 2-6, 2020

Porsgrunn, Norway: The PIT Festival
June 19-20, 2020

-Jonathan P. Eburne

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Jennifer Johnson: To begin with, since both of you have quite distinct perspectives-you, Susan, as a scholar and a Carrington expert, and you, Stacy, as a theatre director-could you each speak to how you came across the work of Leonora Carrington?

Susan Aberth: I was drawn to the work of Leonora Carrington by complete chance. I was working on 57th Street in New York at the time and came upon Brewster Gallery where she was then showing. As I gazed at her work it awakened something long buried inside me, it was like speaking one's native language after a long hiatus. I think there was a split-second decision I made while standing in front of a painting-that I would write my PhD dissertation on her. It was like a mystical experience.

Stacy Klein: I had been working for several years on a Latin American Cycle, the fifth cycle of performances at Double Edge. This included Once a Blue Moon- Cada Luna Azul, which was an outdoor spectacle revolving around co-artistic director Carlos Uriona's experience in the military dictatorship in Argentina, his birthplace, as well as a look into the cultural traditions of South America. After success creating two touring spectacles with this material, we decided to do an indoor piece exploring the Chilean dictatorship and drawing from Alejandro Jodorowsky's books, particularly his memoir Where the Bird Sings Best (1992), about his family's migration to South America, told in a magical realist style. The failed election in the US happened right as we were starting to work, and I decided never again to do a performance that did not have a woman lead. Thus I searched for a Latin American artist (a visual artist, because I am drawn to an image-based artistry). I had never really worked with a woman painter before. And while I was searching I found a couple of really interesting painters from Argentina and Mexico. Then my friend told me about Leonora; she had just been to visit her son Gabi, who took her to Leonora's house, and she thought I should look at her paintings. I couldn't believe that I had never seen her work before because it was much more familiar to me than any of the work that I had done with any painter, in every way. Particularly her landscapes-paintings such as The House Opposite (1945), and La Chasse (1942), and Down Below (1940), Kron Flower (1987), among so many others-and the Kabbalistic and Alchemical worlds they depict. And then I started reading her books, and Stone Door was for me astonishing.

SA: A recognition of one's reality, seen in pictorial form.

JJ: I know that for both of you, your work draws from and uses different magical traditions. In the work of Double Edge Theatre you can really see it in the recourse to the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism throughout the company's performance history, as for instance, Shekinah and Sheba-the Feminine Divine archetypes we saw in Shahrazad: A Tale of Love and Magic (2013). Can you speak to how you've used such imagery, as well as to how Leonora used it I'm also interested in how Leonora's work invokes the Feminine Divine, and how have you brought that forward as well, both now and in the past?

SA: That's a big question.

JJ: It is; it's large. Cut it into pieces and answer it how you want.

SA: It's a great question. I have had astrologers and mediums tell me my mission on earth is to help reintroduce the Divine Feminine into the world, and before they told me this I had already known it as my mission from a very young age. I have steadfastly gone on that path through a variety of different spiritual practices. Just now I think people are coming to a greater realization about these traditions, but it was not always so. One phase of it began in the 1970s with feminism, with Marija Gimbutas and the Great Goddess, but I was not always comfortable with that imagery. So for me Leonora Carrington was the most pure manifestation of that impetus but in a non-stereotypical manner, involving a lot of diversity. Also, what I really liked about her work from the first moment I encountered it was that it wasn't overt; it didn't copy other peoples' Goddess forms. It was her own genuine vision and permutation of women's place in the universe, not even particularly as a supreme being but as an equal kind of being or even energy. I also respected her deeply as both an artist and as a person. She connected women's rights and animal rights, for instance, in ways that weren't really being talked about, and there she was doing it in the 1950s, you know, equating the two. She was a real visionary.

SK: Well, I have always felt myself to be female, and that was something - at least in my upbringing- that was looked at as strong, powerful, and bold. I never realized that this was something unusual until I went to college and was suddenly surrounded by men who in many cases, assumed the power was theirs to have and hold, and this was not part of my upbringing, certainly not from my father. So that shocked me into a desire to look into things: why the world was so different than the way I felt. And then in the 1970s the book When God was a Woman came out and I was like: oh yeah, this makes sense. And so then I realized that I needed to start researching Judaism, in terms what was really there. I had somehow been transported into a Male Christian Reality. I needed to find my own story. Kabbalastic writings are centered around duality, God is a dual male/female being and spirit, so that made sense to me. So I think I've been in that other, older-but also completely new-reality since then, in a variety of ways. It can be mystical but also an everyday ritual practice. And lately I find its tied to a daily courage that one must evoke to tear oneself out of the status quo. The center of that Kabbalistic reality is the Shekinah, the dwelling of the divine presence, so she is always the one to whom I'm calling out. Then there's everything else. There are many women who are calling out to that same source under different names, who are fighting to call out to it, or who don't know the names to call. So it's really important that we connect to that center, that dwelling, because when we're fragmented as women we can easily lose ourselves or get swallowed up into the universal male Christian reality, which has oppressed the spirituality of many women.

SA: I'm going to comment here because I'm very interested in what you just said. I grew up in an ethnic household where my mother ruled and so I was used to female power and autonomy, and I was very free. When I went to college- which is the ultimate site of male institutional brainwashing, I too was shocked. I began my career as an Egyptologist specifically to look at different religious traditions, because I certainly wasn't part of White Protestant Anglo Saxonism; that's who really runs educational institutions. I turned out to become an African Art Major-anything to get away from that singular, oppressive vision that I did not grow up with, I did not identify with. I think a lot of people are like that.

JJ: In Leonora's work, she's often subverting the images of male Christianity you've each described, like the Trinity- or else invoking and renaming figures such as Mary, or the Goddess. She also uses a variety of tactics and traditions and images that are Kabbalistic or Celtic or associated with Tibetan Buddhism.

SA: It is a known fact that much of Christian iconography and practice comes from the Pagan world. And it's not just that Leonora Carrington is reclaiming it; she's saying that the Christian patriarchs stole it. It was all women's mysteries at one point in time, or people's mysteries. It was taken over, renamed by the patriarchy and colonialism. So I think hers is an act not only of reclamation but of expansion.

SK: Yeah, I really like that because I think ritual is ritual. It's very common and very shared. It's not okay to just assign it as-

SA: -the sole property of one belief system. That's ridiculous.

SK: Yes.

JJ: Thinking about ritual and ceremony and invocation, I've come to understand that for Leonora the act of painting was an invocation. Susan, you told me that she didn't even really title many of these paintings. They weren't mere narrative depictions but magical operations. I'm wondering if you could speak a bit to this idea of invocation in terms of her artistic practice, as well as in the creation of Double Edge Theatre's performance dedicated to her life and work, to which the three of us are contributing. How are we creating an individualized ritualistic practice for each of us, and how has this been created for each performance? How do you envision this in your directing work, Stacy?

SK: I was thinking that our process in developing Leonora & Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro is a different process than before. Maybe it's a similar process to Song of Absence a long time ago, because it is a process where I feel like I'm collaborating with Leonora directly, so my ritual is with her.

SA: That's really nice.

SK: And I'm trying to invoke her presence in one way or another. If we try to improvise about a painting, for instance, Grandmother Morehead's Aromatic Kitchen (1974), and we veer too far from the concept or vision, it simply doesn't work. It is not an abstract ritual but one that is already provided for in the form and question of her paintings. I'm saying it's different because normally I would try to make aspects of the training into a ritual, or a group ritual, but now the very development of the project has been the collaboration. I've asked you in particular, Jennifer, as the lead actor playing Leonora (or invoking her), to create your own ritual inside of this process, which is sort of like saying that you will be the Priestess, say, of this whole larger ritual, and the other people involved have to be revolving around that ritual-or they're allowed to participate in a ritual that's been created, so you can lead them around this ritual created by us, me and Leonora. So that's what I think is different in this work, and I really feel something deep at work in this.

SK: We should be using pomegranates as part of the blood rituals, like we did in rehearsal. I think that's beautiful.

SA: I feel that Leonora's descent into the "down below" of her memoir Down Below (1943) was that of Persephone in the Underworld. I think that's how she looked at it: she went down below, and actual violation was part of it, just like in Persephone's case. And then she escaped.

I'm going to get back to your question, Jennifer: I want to address the use of ritual. A lot of sacred art is static and meditative. Artists and ritual magic have always gone hand in hand, each serving the other from time immemorial. Leonora brings this back for Modernism via the Surrealist idiom, the only movement that allowed many varieties of esotericism fully back into modernist discourse; it was great that she did that. But I have to say that it wasn't until I came here to Double Edge-and it was a great revelation to me, thank you-that I fully appreciated the extent to which Leonora was deeply involved in theatre. She loved the ritualistic aspect of it, and you can see that in her stage designs and costumes. She not only wrote plays but she also participated in every aspect of the theater. Although I intellectually understood all this, I had never experienced the kind of ritual magic aspect of her theatrical work until I watched you at work-and I saw you, just like any magician, honing down the magic circle, asking what's going to work, what's the distillation, how can this give us this desired result. I really learned a lot, and when I first came here I tried to help by offering up, among other things, the films of Kenneth Anger. Every performance I witnessed here at Double Edge was different; I could see that-I recognized the difficulty of that skill. I think Leonora was always doing this, too, but she's also very British. And the British part of her is that biting, sardonic humor that often hides behind the ridiculous and the fantastical, like Lewis Carroll.

JJ: It seems to me that a lot of women's work and artwork that includes some sort of spiritualism tends to be very handily dismissed. It seems like Leonora's work, because of this aspect of occultism, or this magic that she so authentically brings out in her work and in herself, can and has been easily dismissed in terms of the world of art history.

SA: Any kind of spiritual content in art tends to be viewed by the current art establishment as non-serious, non-intellectual. Likewise, anything spiritual or religious is a dirty word in academia; you can't do it. I believe Leonora's great saving grace is that she's not a proselytizer. She's not even really a believer in any one tradition or another; she's a juggler, an explorer, an investigator-but more importantly I believe that she is also a channeler. She herself saw things; they just appeared, she could not begin to guess from where, and they communicated with her in visual ways, she just tried desperately to catch it on canvas before the door closed. So she was immersed in the mystery of her own visions and you get that feeling when you look at certain of the works in particular. Looking at a painting like The Garden of Paracelsus (1957) or The Candle Game (1966), they look explicitly magical; things are happening. Or even Nunscape in Manzanillo (1956). In all of them, there is a haziness, a vision-like feeling. A charged space. I see these elements in your performance. You try to direct it and control it, and you do so, but there is still that dangerous element. There is always the possibility that a spell can go awry.

JJ: One of the ideas you've spoken with us about before, and which in fact we use in the performance, is Leonora's ideas about the mysteries that have been stolen from women's traditions, as well as the idea that no one can give women their rights because their rights are inherent; they are not to be given to them since they are always already existing. She easily articulates something that we continue to grapple with in our contemporary society. There's a darkness there. I think this can really inspire young women. Leonora was truly radical, and when we talk to people about her they all note that she was saying things that no one else was really talking about. You both mentioned that you felt feminism was the natural way when you were growing up; I wonder where that came from for Leonora? Was it her mother and her grandmother?

SA: It was a combination of things. I believe that first and foremost she did not consider herself fully human: she was part fairie, according to family lore. From a very early age she saw things; she was non-normative. She was born very wealthy but identified with the Irish half of the family-the Irish underclass, and everything that she associated with Irish knowledge traditions, which are often strikingly non-Christian, matrilineal, and mystical. Also from her Irish side was her political scrappiness and rebelliousness. Combine that with the fact that she was "to the manor born" and thus well protected, this means that she also had a certain degree of privilege. And then there was her dominant personality. All these happy accidents led to her being a visionary, but let's make no mistake-she also suffered profoundly. She was expelled from schools for not obeying rules, she was in constant conflict with her father, and although extremely intelligent had a piecemeal education at best at a series of convent schools. After being disowned by her family she went from wealth to poverty. She paid a heavy price to become an artist and to be free but being free was always her first choice. I think she was extraordinarily brave. What do you think?

SK: I think that she probably did not have a lot of choice. She was who she was and I don't think she could fit into the box that was offered to her, even if that meant losing her wealth, which probably was the very least of it-or being raped, or having to deal with all these men in the art world, or many, many other things.

SA: So she had an innate inability to conform, because she was an artist.

SK: Because she was an artist, and because of all the things you said. Because she had a strong spirit in her, because she could see something. I think seers are generally prone to having to live difficult lives. I think the fact that she could paint, for instance, probably saved her life. Because if she had no way to express all this she would have been like Cassandra: a visionary to whom nobody listened. So I think that's probably the gift that was given to her in return. I don't think somebody like that can just fit in. I watched my daughter Cariel as she was growing uo and I hoped she would not get kicked out of schools. She wasn't going to be able to stop herself. I think many women are like that. If they were men they'd be viewed as rambunctious, or as having spirit-it's looked on positively-"oh, you will be rich someday!"

I also think that Leonora's mother probably couldn't contain her own spirit, even though she was married to a rich industrialist and listened to him (or so we think). But she obviously did something differently with Leonora to help her learn and understand her history.

SA: Good point.

SK: You mentioned Leonora's enormous escape. And she did pulled off this dramatic escape, but it wasn't the only one.

SA: Well, yes: she called them a series of running away.

JJ: In The Hearing Trumpet she writes something like: be careful about what you pack when you're leaving forever. What are your thoughts about that kind of escape or re-invention of one's artistic or spiritual life? Someone once asked Leonora if she thought the past ever dies, and her answer was: only if the present slits its throat. She had some crucial escapes-not just ideas about escape, but real escapes to stay alive in this world.

SA: I can't speak for everyone but I can speak for myself, and I think that when women leave home or leave the path of normativity, it is actually a life-and-death situation. I've done it many, many times. It's exhausting and terrifying, and you really come across some serious dangers. Yes, Leonora was born into some volatile times, but she created a lot of volatility herself as well. She was always reinventing herself, and yet she was-remarkably-always the same. I think that the people around her may have changed, and the environments may have changed, but Leonora was always herself, whatever that means.

SK: Which is a really difficult thing to do because, at least for me-and please don't laugh at me when I say this‚-I have often had an impulse to try to fit in a little bit more than I am called to do. People might say I'm going overboard, and I wonder: am I going overboard? It's hard to adjust and still be totally yourself. Leonora grew up in a patriarchal aristocracy. She was looking very far back to her ancestors, and very far forward as well.

SA: In the beginning, Leonora's ticket out was her beauty. She had incredible beauty, and she was charismatic. She used that beauty to get out. She could have used it to do what her parents wanted her to do and marry, but she used it to escape, to join up with artists, and when she got to Mexico in 1942, life changed and she couldn't use it anymore, she didn't want to, she became serious. She wanted to provide for her children, to raise her family. Remember, she was a mother first and foremost. Her husband couldn't always do that, he was so traumatized by the war. She was always a feminist, but that's where it really started to grow. You can always fake it while you are an object of desire, right? But when you lose that, you go a different route, and that's when I think she got really angry. She was always beautiful, and wonderful.

SK: I think she was still traditionally beautiful when she first got to Mexico; she could have gone a different path, but she had an animal instinct in her. There is something ferocious in her beauty.

SA: She was a beautiful warrior. She often cloaked her beauty in dowdy clothes; she wasn't always seductive in any traditional way.

JJ: I recently read a letter that she wrote when she was in her 30s, in which she writes that she is preparing for death, that she has grown old. I don't think she seriously thought that she'd grown old, but that she'd decided to inhabit what you are talking about: that she's decided to move away from youth and beauty.

SA: That's the case with The Hearing Trumpet, too. She wrote that novel when she was in her early 30s, even though it wasn't published until much later.

SK: That may have been her desire. Beauty did not bring her many good things. Beauty made people behave toward her in certain ways. I think she looked at Marian Leatherby, the nonagenarian protagonist of The Hearing Trumpet, with envy.

SA: I think meeting Remedios Varo (1908-1963) in Mexico changed her life. For the first time she had an equal. I don't know if you've ever had that; I've only had it once. A real meeting of the minds that creates a synergistic, magical reality that profoundly changes everything. They met when Leonora was about 26-very young. She gets to Mexico in 1942.

JJ: I'd like to talk about Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose encounters with Leonora form the basis of Leonora & Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro. We've been thinking about how unusual it was for Jodorowsky to have a female mentor. It's important that he went looking for this, with varying success. He brought everything he is to this search, certainly. He is a famous personality with a large cult following, a celebrity, whereas Carrington has remained lesser known, although I think this is changing, thanks to your work, Susan. It seems like she did not really chase that kind of notoriety.

SA: No, she chased it; recognition that is, she wanted it more than anything. She couldn't get a foot in the door. It was impossible. The sexism of the art world is still profound. There are a few women who are allowed into the sacred arena-Louise Bourgeois, for instance, but it's important to remember that her husband was a very famous art critic, so that helped. I would often hear Leonora talk about how she was one of the best artists ever!

SK: I agree with her.

SA: And I really love that about her. It wasn't about egoism or money; she just felt she was a really good artist and she wanted people to recognize that, to see her work.

SK: I don't have any doubts about that. She should have been able to share her work, and she was just as good as any of the surrealists: Bunuel, Max Ernst. In my deep belief, she was far more visionary..

SA: The ability to work in different media, across all media, with so much thought behind every detail. It's appalling that she remained "forgotten" for so long . And not only was she a woman, but she was in Mexico.

SK: Maybe if she had kept ties to her aristocratic family she could have used them to break into the art world.

SA: But think of the great artist Lee Miller (1907-1977). She was married to a surrealist, but even her own son didn't know to what an extent she was an artist. Not until he found her photographs in the attic did he realize the full scope of her talent and involvement. The sexism of the art world, of the surrealists- all of it-we can't even begin to imagine the dismissal, the lack of opportunity. Things are better for your daughters. It's not good enough, but it's getting better.

SK: Yes, it's not good enough. The fact that there is still a struggle to get her work out there... it's not good enough.

SA: It's an ongoing struggle.

JJ: Leonora Carrington was a visionary, a feminist, and an animal rights activist. She was also an environmentalist.

SA: She is a political artist.

JJ: She had such a radical imagination of the world, of how she views humankind's place within it. I'm thinking about an awareness and a thoughtfulness about land-and how this relates to Double Edge Theater's mission, and how it relates to Carrington in turn.

SA: Stacy, I would like to ask you: were you drawn to Leonora for this reason, or was it more the esoteric content of her work that attracted you? Or was it the whole package...

SK: I don't think the esoteric can be separated from an awareness of the world as ecological. One of the reasons that I love The Stone Door is its duality of the mystical and the earthly at the same time. When I read this work, I'm traveling through these places and landscapes. The elements. She includes everything, and that's what I'm drawn to in her work. It's spiritual, it's political, it's life-affirming, it's all the different dimensions that we can travel through. I'm not interested in fragmented art.

SA: I'd like to say that I'm so excited about this performance, Leonora & Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestr o. A lot of young women today are interested in magic and witches, and it often ends up being portrayed as one-dimensional and comic-booky, but there's a great complexity and historical depth to this interest, as well as a contemporary political urgency. I'm really hoping that people will begin to see Leonora Carrington a little more deeply as well, with all the complexity her work contains. Magic and art and creativity are linked, and that is what I really love about Leonora as well. She would always say that painting is magic; it is a magical act. I think all artwork is a magical act.

: :

Bios:

Susan L. Aberth is associate professor in the Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard College. In addition to her 2004 book Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries), she has contributed to Seeking the Marvelous: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (Fulgur Press, 2020), Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (Phoenix Art Museum, 2019), Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvelous (Routledge Press, 2018), Leonora Carrington: Cuentos Magicos (Museo de Arte Moderno & INBA, Mexico City, 2018), Unpacking: The Marciano Collection (Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2017), and Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as to Abraxas: International Journal of Esoteric Studies, Black Mirror, and Journal of Surrealism of the Americas.

Jennifer Johnson joined the Double Edge Ensemble after two decades of collaboration as an actor, dramaturg, and training leader. She is a Co-Artistic Director of Double Edge, and was a co-creator and actor of Keter, the Crowning Song in the 1990s, Relentless in the early 2000s, and most recently co-created and performed as Leonora in Leonora & Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro, which premiered in 2018. Johnson appeared in many Spectacles at Double Edge, most notably as Lucy Stone in We The People, Athena in The Odyssey and as La Senora in Once a Blue Moon, and directed the oral history project in The Ashfield Town Spectacle. She portrays Leonora Carrington in the Double Edge Fall Spectacle Leonora's World.

Stacy Klein founded Double Edge Theatre in 1982 and under her leadership, the company has grown into one of the foremost ensemble theatres in the US. Klein has conceived and directed five original performance cycles, which have earned her international recognition for daring and innovation. In 2013 she received a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. Her work developing the concepts of Living Culture and Art Justice has been groundbreaking and an integral part of developing the DE Center. Klein's current work relates to the Latin American cycle and includes Leonora & Alejandro: La Maga y el Maestro, Leonora's World, and SUGA, which are touring internationally.

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"All Artwork Is a Magical Act": An Interview with Susan Aberth and Stacy Klein / Jennifer Johnson - ASAP/J

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"All Artwork Is a Magical Act" An Interview with Susan Aberth and Stacy Klein, by Jennifer Johnson Founded in 1982, Double Edge Theatre is a collaborative, residential theater company located since 1994 on a former dairy farm in Western Massachusetts (on the ancestral lands of Mohican, Nipmuc, and Pocumtuc people).

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Miami-born, Detroit-based artist Hernan Bas discusses his work and myriad inspirations, including paranormal activity, the occult, romanticism, Florida life, the horror of Memphis Design, homosexuality, and a certain iconic, campy 80s music video. An internationally renowned painter whose work is featured prominently in ICA Miami’s permanent collection, Bas creates sublime works that mix romantic storytelling, landscape and identity.

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Miami-born, Detroit-based artist Hernan Bas discusses his work and myriad inspirations, including paranormal activity, the occult, romanticism, Florida life, the horror of Memphis Design, homosexuality, and a certain iconic, campy 80s music video. An internationally renowned painter whose work is featured prominently in ICA Miami's permanent collection, Bas creates sublime works that mix romantic storytelling, landscape and identity. Learn more.

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Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

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Miami-born, Detroit-based artist Hernan Bas discusses his work and myriad inspirations, including paranormal activity, the occult, romanticism, Florida life, the horror of Memphis Design, homosexuality, and a certain iconic, campy 80s music video. An internationally renowned painter whose work is featured prominently in ICA Miami's permanent collection, Bas creates sublime works that mix romantic storytelling, landscape and identity.

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Adam & Eve, 2019

Archival pigment giclée on Hahnemuhle Archival Fine Art paper

27 1/2 × 19 3/5 × 1 1/5 in

69.9 × 49.8 × 3 cm

Edition of 150

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Working in oil and acrylic and at small- to mid-scale, Genieve Figgis produces paintings rich in color, texture, humor, and the macabre. Through her work, she explores and sends-up the idealization of luxury and leisure in paintings and photographs throughout art history. Like these historical works, her paintings feature sumptuous domestic interiors and stately country homes, idyllic natural settings, and protagonists dressed in finery and engaged in such activities as feasting, horseback riding, playing piano, or attending a party. Figgis's body of work also includes her take on the tradition of portraiture and the odalisque. In her compositions, however, all is not well. Her figures appear either faceless or as foolishly grinning, ghoul-like creatures, whose loosely rendered forms seem vulnerable and insubstantial as they merge with their lushly painted, semi-abstract surroundings.

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Genieve Figgis | Adam & Eve (2019) | Available for Sale | Artsy

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Working in oil and acrylic and at small- to mid-scale, Genieve Figgis produces paintings rich in color, texture, humor, and the macabre. Through her work, she explores and sends-up the idealization of luxury and leisure in paintings and photographs throughout art history.

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Judith Beheading Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi: Great Art Explained

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Judith Beheading Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi: Great Art Explained

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Women were excluded from almost all cultural and social resources in the centuries from 1400 to 1900 when so much of the world's great art was created.  And visual art was almost entirely a male industry before modern times.
Having an artist for a father was about the only way women could get access to the training expected of artists in Renaissance and baroque Europe.  Women were not allowed to do apprenticeships, attend life classes or be members of the academies. Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia’s father, was a well-known painter, who saw the potential in her from an early age and promoted her talent.
Gentileschi became the very first woman accepted into the prestigious Florentine Academy of Fine Arts.
Through her talent and determination she had a 40-year career, and was collected by the likes of Charles I of England and Philip 4th of Spain.
And yet, she was largely forgotten and written out of art history for 300 years. Why? The simple answer is, because she was a woman.

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Judith Beheading Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi: Great Art Explained

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Vibrant Palette Knife Paintings Capture the Beauty and Strength From Around the World

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Vibrant Palette Knife Paintings Capture the Beauty and Strength From Around the World

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Since graduating from the Florence Academy of Art in 2016, Spanish painter Elena Gual has continued to develop her artistic practice. She's been building on and evolving from more academic techniques to establish her own bold, painterly style. Now based in London, the talented artist channels much of her output towards portraiture and images of the female form-transmitting the strength, power, and beauty of femininity with thick impasto upon her canvases. Her paintings tend to capture a unique light as it catches the almost geometric juxtaposition of her dense brushstrokes. From this light comes a softness that is underscored by the firm contours of her subjects, etched in rich pigments that leap from the planar surface of the canvas.

"I have always been connected to the human form," Gual tells My Modern Met, "especially since I graduated from the Florence Academy of Art. While studying there I felt that I had to express those emotions with my own signature-being today my own painting style. So nowadays, I keep trying to explore the feelings women evoke, as I feel they have so much to tell about them. I feel that any artist's work is a reflection of ourselves, so at the end of the day, mine is my biography. Since a very young age, I have been lucky enough to travel to every continent various times; and on those trips, I was able to meet amazing women in a lot of remote places where I learnt that not all women can express themselves freely. That's what gave me the urge to start to give them a voice, and I try to continue doing it in my work."

Scroll down to see images of Gual's incredible paintings. To keep up with the artist's latest work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram.

Spanish artist Elena Gual captures powerful portraits of women using thick impasto.

The artist seeks to empower women by giving them a voice and channels much of her output towards portraiture and images of the female form.

Her paintings transmit the power, strength, and beauty of feminity through their vibrant colors and steady, decisive brushstrokes.
Photorealistic "Double Exposure" Portrait Paintings Reflect the Complexities of Life Itself 28 Iconic Artists Who Immortalized Themselves Through Famous Self-Portraits Mind-Bending Artwork Transforms From One Portrait Into Two Completely Different Paintings Artist Paints Portraits of Black Women Using Real Hair To Show the Beauty of Natural Styles Elena Gual: Website | Instagram
My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Elena Gual.

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Vibrant Palette Knife Paintings Capture the Beauty and Strength From Around the World

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"I have been lucky enough to travel to every continent various times; and on those trips, I was able to meet amazing women in a lot of remote places where I learnt that not all women can express themselves freely."

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Family Portrait, 2015

Acrylic on panel

39 3/10 × 31 1/2 in

99.9 × 79.9 cm

Bonhams

Estimated value: £55,000–£75,000

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Working in oil and acrylic and at small- to mid-scale, Genieve Figgis produces paintings rich in color, texture, humor, and the macabre. Through her work, she explores and sends-up the idealization of luxury and leisure in paintings and photographs throughout art history. Like these historical works, her paintings feature sumptuous domestic interiors and stately country homes, idyllic natural settings, and protagonists dressed in finery and engaged in such activities as feasting, horseback riding, playing piano, or attending a party. Figgis's body of work also includes her take on the tradition of portraiture and the odalisque. In her compositions, however, all is not well. Her figures appear either faceless or as foolishly grinning, ghoul-like creatures, whose loosely rendered forms seem vulnerable and insubstantial as they merge with their lushly painted, semi-abstract surroundings.

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Genieve Figgis | Family Portrait (2015) | Available for Sale | Artsy

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Working in oil and acrylic and at small- to mid-scale, Genieve Figgis produces paintings rich in color, texture, humor, and the macabre. Through her work, she explores and sends-up the idealization of luxury and leisure in paintings and photographs throughout art history.

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Traditional Paintings by Lino Lago Mysteriously Revealed Beneath Fields of Color

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Traditional Paintings by Lino Lago Mysteriously Revealed Beneath Fields of Color

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Lino Lago paints realistic portraits and scenes in oil and adds a layer of abstracted intrigue using bright fields of color. His recent series, Fake Abstract, is comprised of classically-styled portraits of women, mostly obscured by solid blocks of red, pink, or blue. A thin sliver or squiggle, reminiscent of a finger dragged across a foggy window, reveals a peek at the figure beneath the color. It is up to the viewer’s imagination whether Lago paints a full portrait and covers it in color, or, uses the color as the base and adds the portrait into the blank canvas left by the squiggle.

The artist has also explored juxtapositions of traditional European interiors—dining rooms, parlors, and museum galleries—with unexplained splashes of bright color that appear to explode into the rooms from doorways and windows.

Lago, who is Spanish and resides in Spain and Lithuania, exhibits widely and has upcoming shows at Bredgade Kunsthandel in Copenhagen (April 12), Geraldine Banier in Paris (June 7th), Moret Art in Coruña, Spain (end of June), and Goodwin Fine Art in Denver (November).

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Lino Lago paints realistic portraits and scenes in oil and adds a layer of abstracted intrigue using bright fields of color. His recent series, Fake Abstract, is comprised of classically-styled portraits of women, mostly obscured by solid blocks of red, pink, or blue. A thin sliver or squiggle, reminiscent of a finger dragged across a foggy window, reveals a peek at the figure beneath the color. It is up to the viewer's imagination whether Lago paints a full portrait and covers it in color, or, uses the color as the base and adds the portrait into the blank canvas left by the squiggle.

The artist has also explored juxtapositions of traditional European interiors-dining rooms, parlors, and museum galleries-with unexplained splashes of bright color that appear to explode into the rooms from doorways and windows.

Lago, who is Spanish and resides in Spain and Lithuania, exhibits widely and has upcoming shows at Bredgade Kunsthandel in Copenhagen (April 12), Geraldine Banier in Paris (June 7th), Moret Art in Coruña, Spain (end of June), and Goodwin Fine Art in Denver (November). You can see more of Lago's artwork on his website.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member and support independent arts publishing. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, help support our interview series, gain access to partner discounts, and much more. Join now!

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Traditional Paintings by Lino Lago Mysteriously Revealed Beneath Fields of Color

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Lino Lago paints realistic portraits and scenes in oil and adds a layer of abstracted intrigue using bright fields of color. His recent series, Fake Abstract, is comprised of classically-styled portraits of women, mostly obscured by solid blocks of red, pink, or blue. A thin sliver or squiggle, remi

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Self-Portrait in 年的自畫像, dated 2015

oil on canvas
Painting
40 by 27.1 cm.

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Find the latest shows, biography, and artworks for sale by Ana Maria Pacheco

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An Ancient Dark Night Descended Upon My Soul II, 2010-12

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An Ancient Dark Night Descended Upon My Soul II, 2010-12

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Ana Maria Pacheco

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Ana Maria Pacheco | An Ancient Dark Night Descended Upon My Soul II (2010-12) | Available for Sale | Artsy

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Available for sale from Pratt Contemporary, Ana Maria Pacheco, An Ancient Dark Night Descended Upon My Soul II (2010-12), Drypoint, 99.2 × 75.7 cm

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Ana Maria Pacheco, Dark Event VII, 2007, engraving drypoint, 68 x 60.7 cm, © Ana Maria Pacheco. All Rights Reserved 2017/ Bridgeman Images

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Ana Maria Pacheco, 'Dark Night of the Soul: Saint Sebastian', 1999

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Ana Maria Pacheco, 'Dark Night of the Soul: Saint Sebastian', 1999

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Ana Maria Pacheco is a painter, sculptor and printmaker who was born in Brazil in 1943 and has lived in England since 1973.

Her work deals with issues of control and the exercise of power, drawing upon the tensions between the old world of Europe and the new world of her Brazilian birth.

Her work was displayed in the exhibition Ana Maria Pacheco: New Painting and Sculpture on Tour from the National Gallery 29 September 1999 - 9 January 2000.

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Tales of Transformations 1, 1998

Drypoint
Printed on Somerset TP 300gsm
Edition of 20
Plate: 17.5 x 20 cm

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Journeys 1, 2011

Monotype
Printed on Somerset TP 300gsm and heightened in pencil
Plate: 66.5 x 50.8 cm
Private Collection

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Descent, 2011-12

A work on paper in nine parts
Tempera and gold leaf
Framed 170 x 109 cm
Private Collection

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Ana Maria Pacheco

As Proezas de Macunaíma 11
1995

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'As Proezas de Macunaíma 11', Ana Maria Pacheco, 1995 | Tate

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Artwork page for 'As Proezas de Macunaíma 11', Ana Maria Pacheco, 1995

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Sculptor, printmaker, draughtsman, painter and teacher, born in Brazil, producing powerful and sometimes disturbing work in which death, magic and sexuality were important elements. Between 1960–4 Pacheco worked for degrees in sculpture and music at University in Goias, in 1965 studying music and education at the University of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro. After teaching sculpture and art at University in Goias, 1966–1973, from 1973–5 Pacheco was at the Slade School of Fine Art on a British Council Scholarship, taught by Reg Butler.

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Sculptor, printmaker, draughtsman, painter and teacher, born in Brazil, producing powerful and sometimes disturbing work in which death, magic and sexuality were important elements. Between 1960-4 Pacheco worked for degrees in sculpture and music at University in Goias, in 1965 studying music and education at the University of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro. After teaching sculpture and art at University in Goias, 1966-1973, from 1973-5 Pacheco was at the Slade School of Fine Art on a British Council Scholarship, taught by Reg Butler.

Read more

Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)

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Sculptor, printmaker, draughtsman, painter and teacher, born in Brazil, producing powerful and sometimes disturbing work in which death, magic and sexuality were important elements. Between 1960-4 Pacheco worked for degrees in sculpture and music at University in Goias, in 1965 studying music and education at the University of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro.

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The Collections database consists of entries for more than 480,000 works in the Musée du Louvre and Musée National Eugène-Delacroix.

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More than 300 of our books to read and download for free

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Marta de la Torre, Margaret G. H. MacLean, Randall Mason, David Myers

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Heritage Values in Site Management: Four

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Books in the fields of art, photography, archaeology, architecture, conservation, and the humanities for both general and specialized audiences.

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The Library and Research Center (LRC) holds primary-source records in the Archives of Women Artists as well as the historical records of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

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The Library and Research Center (LRC) holds primary-source records in the Archives of Women Artists as well as the historical records of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

The Archives of Women Artists

The Archives of Women Artists is dedicated to collecting and preserving the papers and primary records of women visual artists and organizations that promote women's contributions to the arts. The archive includes personal papers, correspondence, gallery guides, sketches, photographs and slides, and other unique materials.

Finding Aids

Use our detailed finding aids to explore available materials in the Archives of Women Artists.

Photo credit: Donald Woodman

Donating Materials to the LRC

Interested in donating materials to the Archives of Women Artists? Email the Library and Research Center at LRC@nmwa.org for donation guidelines. Please write "request for donation guidelines" in the subject line.

Citing Material

When citing materials in the LRC collections, patrons should include the following information in the citation: a copyright notice (if the copyright holder is known); acknowledgment of the photographer (if applicable); the title of the collection; and the credit line "National Museum of Women in the Arts, Library and Research Center."

The Library and Research Center offers access to online databases as well as research guides on topics such as Latin American women artists, women sculptors, and women artists of the Dutch Golden Age.

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The Library and Research Center (LRC) holds primary-source records in the Archives of Women Artists as well as the historical records of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The Archives of Women Artists The Archives of Women Artists is dedicated to collecting and preserving the papers and primary records of women visual artists and organizations that promote women's contributions to the arts.

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The Comedian, 2017

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Drawing from a difficult upbringing spent in an impoverished public housing project in Chicago, with a broken family, Nathaniel Mary Quinn makes large-scale, mixed-media drawings and paintings of collaged and fragmented figures, through which he demonstrates that we are all the sum of our experiences. In his words, "I hope to convey a sense of how our experiences, both good and bad, operate to construct our identities. I also want to portray a mutual relationship between the acceptable and the unacceptable, the grotesque and what is aesthetically pleasing." Formed from an amalgam of family photographs, images from articles and advertisements, and his own furious brushstrokes and charcoal marks, the men and women who populate his compositions appear as hybrids, at once monstrous and delicate. For Quinn, they are portraits of his fractured family, and images of our multi-faceted selves.

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Nathaniel Mary Quinn | The Comedian (2017) | Available for Sale | Artsy

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Drawing from a difficult upbringing spent in an impoverished public housing project in Chicago, with a broken family, Nathaniel Mary Quinn makes large-scale, mixed-media drawings and paintings of collaged and fragmented figures, through which he demonstrates that we are all the sum of our experiences.

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Paula Rego, Obedience and Defiance is a major retrospective by one of the most influential figurative artists of our time Paula Rego. Spanning Rego’s entire career from the 1960s, comprising more than 80 works, including paintings never seen before and works on paper from the artist’s family and close friends.

The selection of works focuses on the moral challenges to humanity, particularly in the face of violence, gender discrimination and political tyranny. There are paintings and etchings related to children sold into slavery in North Africa (1996-98), abortion (1998-2000) and female genital mutilation (from 2009). Many of the images begin with the artist’s Portuguese roots and childhood experiences or respond to current affairs.

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IMMA presents 'Paula Rego, Obedience and Defiance'

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Photographer Creates His Own 78-Card Tarot Deck Inspired by His Sleep Paralysis [Interview]

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Like many people, photographer Nicolas Bruno is enthralled by tarot cards. Having interacted with the mysterious cards at a young age, the deck of divination continued to pique his interest into adulthood. Now, Bruno's latest series, titled The Somnia Tarot, depicts the entire 78-card deck and considers the symbology behind the alluring images that are often used to predict the future.

Bruno began his tarot card photography by referring to his portfolio of surreal imagery. His previous work dealt with his experience with sleep paralysis as well as dream journals that have ultimately cultivated a visual language detailing his complicated relationship with a good night's rest. This conceptual approach to his photographs allowed for an easy transition into recreating the classic Rider Waite tarot deck. "Because my Sleep Paralysis series and the classic tarot deal with the subconscious and conscious mind," he tells My Modern Met, "creating fluid parallels between the two bodies of work was a seamless process."

The Somnia Tarot is now on display at the Haven Gallery in Northport, New York, until March 21, 2021. In addition to the exhibition, Bruno has fashioned his photographs into his own deck of cards that will be available for pre-order soon.

We spoke more with Bruno about this series-including the logistics of creating it entirely during the coronavirus. Scroll down for our exclusive interview.
What was the inspiration for this project?
My mission for The Somnia Tarot was to reinterpret the entirety of the classic Rider Waite tarot deck through conceptual photography, sculpture, and costume design. Through consultation of my dream journals, I developed my own take on the meanings behind each card while remaining true to the intentions behind the classic tarot. From basic sketch to final photograph, I poured all of my creative energy into this project over the past year. To my knowledge, this is one of the first representations of the entire tarot through conceptual photography.
Where did your interest in tarot cards come from?
When I was a child, I would often visit my grandmother's house and play with all of the interesting antique model trains in her basement. The basement had a storage room, and I stumbled across my great-grandmother's tarot deck. I would always enjoy looking at the cards until one day my grandmother caught me with them and hid them high up on the storage room shelf.

This was my first interaction with tarot cards, and that memory of the mysterious cards stuck with me to this day. During high school and college, I was exposed to the tarot again through my friends. I loved the style of imagery that it portrayed. I had often thought of recreating one or two cards in my own style, but it wasn't until quarantine that I saw a grand opportunity to create the entire series.
How would you say the coronavirus quarantine informed your photography?
When quarantine began, the majority of art world business came to a grinding halt. The future was uncertain for everyone, and I spent the first few weeks pondering the possibilities of what could happen in a few month's time. I knew that I needed to continue creating in order to keep my spirits up. There was no better time to challenge myself and make the best use of time while the world was on pause.

Every day, I woke up and put 100% of my efforts into developing this series. This project forced me to work faster than I normally do, but giving myself this challenge opened my mind to things that I never thought I could do. I developed an efficient system of creating props and costumes at the beginning of the week and then shooting multiple images at the end of the week. This allowed me to be consistent, creating more efficiently, and completing the final image on the perfect timeline for an exhibition.
This is an ambitious project with 78 images. Logistically, how did you produce this series?
I spent an entire month studying the tarot meanings and the Jungian psychology analysis of each card. During the research, I kept a huge sketchpad and began drawing out concepts for each piece. I consulted my dream journal to tell the stories of each image through the characters that I see within my sleep paralysis experiences.

After I completed my final sketches for each piece, I began creating props and costumes. I planned each shoot day to include up to three images. Even if one of the concepts failed, I would still have images to come home with. All of the male characters in the series are self-portraits, and the female characters are either my sister, girlfriend, or a close friend. Limiting the models to myself and close individuals made the project efficient and COVID-safe.
How long did it take overall?
My planning and scheduling allowed me to finish the final image in early December 2020. This was the largest and most challenging project that I have ever taken on.
Is there one card that is particularly memorable for you?
The most memorable image that I shot was The Tower. This was one of the first images that I shot for the series. I became a character with a burning dollhouse on his back, all while being in the wake of the freezing ocean in early March. This was a very challenging image to shoot, ranging from building the dollhouse itself, to having it burning and tied to my back in the frigid weather. My photography often puts me into difficult situations, and I always feel liberated after completing each challenging concept. This was an idea that had been living in my dream journal for a while, and it finally found its place within this collection of images.
Your previous bodies of work have dealt with your experience with sleep (paralysis and keeping a dream journal). What kind of parallels can viewers find with your tarot cards and your sleep-focused series?
Through this series, the characters and symbols within my Sleep Paralysis imagery tell the story of each tarot card. Figures like The Old Hag and The Shrouded Man make their appearances, while my dream symbols of murky marshlands and tattered rope help communicate complex ideas. Viewers who are familiar with my Sleep Paralysis series will immediately pick up on familiar concepts that I've woven into the tarot imagery. Because my Sleep Paralysis series and the classic tarot deal with the subconscious and conscious mind, creating fluid parallels between the two bodies of work was a seamless process.
What can viewers expect when they see your exhibition?
I hope to immerse my viewers in the story of the classic tarot in an entirely new way. While offering a new glimpse into the world that I create through my conceptual photography, I am also excited to open up the interesting stories of the tarot to new and experienced enthusiasts. There are so many archetypes, life lessons, and clever connections within tarot, and I hope my viewers can use my series to dive deeper into the creativity that lies behind these mysterious cards.
What's on the horizon for you? Anything exciting you can tell us about?
My solo exhibition The Somnia Tarot at Haven Gallery, NY will be on display until March 21st, where all 78 pieces are being exhibited. I will be opening preorders for tarot decks of the series in late March on somniatarot.com, along with a hardcover book. There will be a new video documentary on my artwork and process coming out in late April. All of my upcoming projects and pieces will be shared on my Instagram.

Nicolas Bruno: Website | Instagram

My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Nicolas Bruno.

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Photographer Creates His Own 78-Card Tarot Deck Inspired by His Sleep Paralysis [Interview]

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Like many people, photographer Nicolas Bruno is enthralled by tarot cards. Having interacted with the mysterious cards at a young age, the deck of divination continued to pique his interest into adulthood. Now, Bruno's latest series, titled The Somnia Tarot, depicts the entire 78-card deck and considers the symbology behind the alluring images that are often used to predict the future.

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André Breton

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real life, I mean - that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feels extremely modest: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty, in this respect he is still a newborn babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it. If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything. Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.
But it is true that we would not dare venture so far, it is not merely a question of distance. Threat is piled upon threat, one yields, abandons a portion of the terrain to be conquered. This imagination which knows no bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance with the laws of an arbitrary utility; it is incapable of assuming this inferior role for very long and, in the vicinity of the twentieth year, generally prefers to abandon man to his lusterless fate.

Though he may later try to pull himself together on occasion, having felt that he is losing by slow degrees all reason for living, incapable as he has become of being able to rise to some exceptional situation such as love, he will hardly succeed. This is because he henceforth belongs body and soul to an imperative practical necessity which demands his constant attention. None of his gestures will be expansive, none of his ideas generous or far-reaching. In his mind's eye, events real or imagined will be seen only as they relate to a welter of similar events, events in which he has not participated, abortive events. What am I saying: he will judge them in relationship to one of these events whose consequences are more reassuring than the others. On no account will he view them as his salvation.

Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.

There remains madness, "the madness that one locks up," as it has aptly been described. That madness or another.... We all know, in fact, that the insane owe their incarceration to a tiny number of legally reprehensible acts and that, were it not for these acts their freedom (or what we see as their freedom) would not be threatened. I am willing to admit that they are, to some degree, victims of their imagination, in that it induces them not to pay attention to certain rules - outside of which the species feels threatened - which we are all supposed to know and respect. But their profound indifference to the way in which we judge them, and even to the various punishments meted out to them, allows us to suppose that they derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination, that they enjoy their madness sufficiently to endure the thought that its validity does not extend beyond themselves. And, indeed, hallucinations, illusions, etc., are not a source of trifling pleasure. The best controlled sensuality partakes of it, and I know that there are many evenings when I would gladly that pretty hand which, during the last pages of Taine's L'Intelligence, indulges in some curious misdeeds. I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naiveté has no peer but my own. Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen. And note how this madness has taken shape, and endured.

It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled.

The case against the realistic attitude demands to be examined, following the case against the materialistic attitude. The latter, more poetic in fact than the former, admittedly implies on the part of man a kind of monstrous pride which, admittedly, is monstrous, but not a new and more complete decay. It should above all be viewed as a welcome reaction against certain ridiculous tendencies of spiritualism. Finally, it is not incompatible with a certain nobility of thought.

By contrast, the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity, a dog's life. The activity of the best minds feels the effects of it; the law of the lowest common denominator finally prevails upon them as it does upon the others. An amusing result of this state of affairs, in literature for example, is the generous supply of novels. Each person adds his personal little "observation" to the whole. As a cleansing antidote to all this, M. Paul Valéry recently suggested that an anthology be compiled in which the largest possible number of opening passages from novels be offered; the resulting insanity, he predicted, would be a source of considerable edification. The most famous authors would be included. Such a though reflects great credit on Paul Valéry who, some time ago, speaking of novels, assured me that, so far as he was concerned, he would continue to refrain from writing: "The Marquise went out at five." But has he kept his word?

If the purely informative style, of which the sentence just quoted is a prime example, is virtually the rule rather than the exception in the novel form, it is because, in all fairness, the author's ambition is severely circumscribed. The circumstantial, needlessly specific nature of each of their notations leads me to believe that they are perpetrating a joke at my expense. I am spared not even one of the character's slightest vacillations: will he be fairhaired? what will his name be? will we first meet him during the summer? So many questions resolved once and for all, as chance directs; the only discretionary power left me is to close the book, which I am careful to do somewhere in the vicinity of the first page. And the descriptions! There is nothing to which their vacuity can be compared; they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some stock catalogue, which the author utilizes more and more whenever he chooses; he seizes the opportunity to slip me his postcards, he tries to make me agree with him about the clichés:

The small room into which the young man was shown was covered with yellow wallpaper: there were geraniums in the windows, which were covered with muslin curtains; the setting sun cast a harsh light over the entire setting.... There was nothing special about the room. The furniture, of yellow wood, was all very old. A sofa with a tall back turned down, an oval table opposite the sofa, a dressing table and a mirror set against the pierglass, some chairs along the walls, two or three etchings of no value portraying some German girls with birds in their hands - such were the furnishings. (Dostoevski, Crime and Punishment)

I am in no mood to admit that the mind is interested in occupying itself with such matters, even fleetingly. It may be argued that this school-boy description has its place, and that at this juncture of the book the author has his reasons for burdening me. Nevertheless he is wasting his time, for I refuse to go into his room. Others' laziness or fatigue does not interest me. I have too unstable a notion of the continuity of life to equate or compare my moments of depression or weakness with my best moments. When one ceases to feel, I am of the opinion one should keep quiet. And I would like it understood that I am not accusing or condemning lack of originality as such. I am only saying that I do not take particular note of the empty moments of my life, that it may be unworthy for any man to crystallize those which seem to him to be so. I shall, with your permission, ignore the description of that room, and many more like it.

Not so fast, there; I'm getting into the area of psychology, a subject about which I shall be careful not to joke.

The author attacks a character and, this being settled upon, parades his hero to and fro across the world. No matter what happens, this hero, whose actions and reactions are admirably predictable, is compelled not to thwart or upset -- even though he looks as though he is -- the calculations of which he is the object. The currents of life can appear to lift him up, roll him over, cast him down, he will still belong to this readymade human type. A simple game of chess which doesn't interest me in the least -- man, whoever he may be, being for me a mediocre opponent. What I cannot bear are those wretched discussions relative to such and such a move, since winning or losing is not in question. And if the game is not worth the candle, if objective reason does a frightful job -- as indeed it does -- of serving him who calls upon it, is it not fitting and proper to avoid all contact with these categories? "Diversity is so vast that every different tone of voice, every step, cough, every wipe of the nose, every sneeze...."* (Pascal.) If in a cluster of grapes there are no two alike, why do you want me to describe this grape by the other, by all the others, why do you want me to make a palatable grape? Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable. The desire for analysis wins out over the sentiments.** (Barrès, Proust.) The result is statements of undue length whose persuasive power is attributable solely to their strangeness and which impress the reader only by the abstract quality of their vocabulary, which moreover is ill-defined. If the general ideas that philosophy has thus far come up with as topics of discussion revealed by their very nature their definitive incursion into a broader or more general area. I would be the first to greet the news with joy. But up till now it has been nothing but idle repartee; the flashes of wit and other niceties vie in concealing from us the true thought in search of itself, instead of concentrating on obtaining successes. It seems to me that every act is its own justification, at least for the person who has been capable of committing it, that it is endowed with a radiant power which the slightest gloss is certain to diminish. Because of this gloss, it even in a sense ceases to happen. It gains nothing to be thus distinguished. Stendhal's heroes are subject to the comments and appraisals -- appraisals which are more or less successful -- made by that author, which add not one whit to their glory. Where we really find them again is at the point at which Stendahl has lost them.

We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense. Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices. It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer -- and, in my opinion by far the most important part -- has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. On the basis of these discoveries a current of opinion is finally forming by means of which the human explorer will be able to carry his investigation much further, authorized as he will henceforth be not to confine himself solely to the most summary realities. The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights. If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them -- first to seize them, then, if need be, to submit them to the control of our reason. The analysts themselves have everything to gain by it. But it is worth noting that no means has been designated a priori for carrying out this undertaking, that until further notice it can be construed to be the province of poets as well as scholars, and that its success is not dependent upon the more or less capricious paths that will be followed.

Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of psychic activity (since, at least from man's birth until his death, thought offers no solution of continuity, the sum of the moments of the dream, from the point of view of time, and taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking) has still today been so grossly neglected. I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams. It is because man, when he ceases to sleep, is above all the plaything of his memory, and in its normal state memory takes pleasure in weakly retracing for him the circumstances of the dream, in stripping it of any real importance, and in dismissing the only determinant from the point where he thinks he has left it a few hours before: this firm hope, this concern. He is under the impression of continuing something that is worthwhile. Thus the dream finds itself reduced to a mere parenthesis, as is the night. And, like the night, dreams generally contribute little to furthering our understanding. This curious state of affairs seems to me to call for certain reflections:

1) Within the limits where they operate (or are thought to operate) dreams give every evidence of being continuous and show signs of organization. Memory alone arrogates to itself the right to excerpt from dreams, to ignore the transitions, and to depict for us rather a series of dreams than the dream itself. By the same token, at any given moment we have only a distinct notion of realities, the coordination of which is a question of will.* (Account must be taken of the depth of the dream. For the most part I retain only what I can glean from its most superficial layers. What I most enjoy contemplating about a dream is everything that sinks back below the surface in a waking state, everything I have forgotten about my activities in the course of the preceding day, dark foliage, stupid branches. In "reality," likewise, I prefer to fall.) What is worth noting is that nothing allows us to presuppose a greater dissipation of the elements of which the dream is constituted. I am sorry to have to speak about it according to a formula which in principle excludes the dream. When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers? I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers, the way I surrender myself to those who read me with eyes wide open; in order to stop imposing, in this realm, the conscious rhythm of my thought. Perhaps my dream last night follows that of the night before, and will be continued the next night, with an exemplary strictness. It's quite possible, as the saying goes. And since it has not been proved in the slightest that, in doing so, the "reality" with which I am kept busy continues to exist in the state of dream, that it does not sink back down into the immemorial, why should I not grant to dreams what I occasionally refuse reality, that is, this value of certainty in itself which, in its own time, is not open to my repudiation? Why should I not expect from the sign of the dream more than I expect from a degree of consciousness which is daily more acute? Can't the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life? Are these questions the same in one case as in the other and, in the dream, do these questions already exist? Is the dream any less restrictive or punitive than the rest? I am growing old and, more than that reality to which I believe I subject myself, it is perhaps the dream, the difference with which I treat the dream, which makes me grow old.

2) Let me come back again to the waking state. I have no choice but to consider it a phenomenon of interference. Not only does the mind display, in this state, a strange tendency to lose its bearings (as evidenced by the slips and mistakes the secrets of which are just beginning to be revealed to us), but, what is more, it does not appear that, when the mind is functioning normally, it really responds to anything but the suggestions which come to it from the depths of that dark night to which I commend it. However conditioned it may be, its balance is relative. It scarcely dares express itself and, if it does, it confines itself to verifying that such and such an idea, or such and such a woman, has made an impression on it. What impression it would be hard pressed to say, by which it reveals the degree of its subjectivity, and nothing more. This idea, this woman, disturb it, they tend to make it less severe. What they do is isolate the mind for a second from its solvent and spirit it to heaven, as the beautiful precipitate it can be, that it is. When all else fails, it then calls upon chance, a divinity even more obscure than the others to whom it ascribes all its aberrations. Who can say to me that the angle by which that idea which affects it is offered, that what it likes in the eye of that woman is not precisely what links it to its dream, binds it to those fundamental facts which, through its own fault, it has lost? And if things were different, what might it be capable of? I would like to provide it with the key to this corridor.

3) The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him. The agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill, fly faster, love to your heart's content. And if you should die, are you not certain of reawaking among the dead? Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless.

What reason, I ask, a reason so much vaster than the other, makes dreams seem so natural and allows me to welcome unreservedly a welter of episodes so strange that they could confound me now as I write? And yet I can believe my eyes, my ears; this great day has arrived, this beast has spoken.

If man's awaking is harder, if it breaks the spell too abruptly, it is because he has been led to make for himself too impoverished a notion of atonement.

4) From the moment when it is subjected to a methodical examination, when, by means yet to be determined, we succeed in recording the contents of dreams in their entirety (and that presupposes a discipline of memory spanning generations; but let us nonetheless begin by noting the most salient facts), when its graph will expand with unparalleled volume and regularity, we may hope that the mysteries which really are not will give way to the great Mystery. I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its possession.

A story is told according to which Saint-Pol-Roux, in times gone by, used to have a notice posted on the door of his manor house in Camaret, every evening before he went to sleep, which read: THE POET IS WORKING.

A great deal more could be said, but in passing I merely wanted to touch upon a subject which in itself would require a very long and much more detailed discussion; I shall come back to it. At this juncture, my intention was merely to mark a point by noting the hate of the marvelous which rages in certain men, this absurdity beneath which they try to bury it. Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.

In the realm of literature, only the marvelous is capable of fecundating works which belong to an inferior category such as the novel, and generally speaking, anything that involves storytelling. Lewis' The Monk is an admirable proof of this. It is infused throughout with the presence of the marvelous. Long before the author has freed his main characters from all temporal constraints, one feels them ready to act with an unprecedented pride. This passion for eternity with which they are constantly stirred lends an unforgettable intensity to their torments, and to mine. I mean that this book, from beginning to end, and in the purest way imaginable, exercises an exalting effect only upon that part of the mind which aspires to leave the earth and that, stripped of an insignificant part of its plot, which belongs to the period in which it was written, it constitutes a paragon of precision and innocent grandeur.* (What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.) It seems to me none better has been done, and that the character of Mathilda in particular is the most moving creation that one can credit to this figurative fashion in literature. She is less a character than a continual temptation. And if a character is not a temptation, what is he? An extreme temptation, she. In The Monk the "nothing is impossible for him who dares try" gives it its full, convincing measure. Ghosts play a logical role in the book, since the critical mind does not seize them in order to dispute them. Ambrosio's punishment is likewise treated in a legitimate manner, since it is finally accepted by the critical faculty as a natural denouement.

It may seem arbitrary on my part, when discussing the marvelous, to choose this model, from which both the Nordic literatures and Oriental literatures have borrowed time and time again, not to mention the religious literatures of every country. This is because most of the examples which these literatures could have furnished me with are tainted by puerility, for the simple reason that they are addressed to children. At an early age children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to thoroughly enjoy fairy tales. No matter how charming they may be, a grown man would think he were reverting to childhood by nourishing himself on fairy tales, and I am the first to admit that all such tales are not suitable for him. The fabric of adorable improbabilities must be made a trifle more subtle the older we grow, and we are still at the age of waiting for this kind of spider.... But the faculties do not change radically. Fear, the attraction of the unusual, chance, the taste for things extravagant are all devices which we can always call upon without fear of deception. There are fairy tales to be written for adults, fairy tales still almost blue.

The marvelous is not the same in every period of history: it partakes in some obscure way of a sort of general revelation only the fragments of which come down to us: they are the romantic ruins, the modern mannequin, or any other symbol capable of affecting the human sensibility for a period of time. In these areas which make us smile, there is still portrayed the incurable human restlessness, and this is why I take them into consideration and why I judge them inseparable from certain productions of genius which are, more than the others, painfully afflicted by them. They are Villon's gibbets, Racine's Greeks, Baudelaire's couches. They coincide with an eclipse of the taste I am made to endure, I whose notion of taste is the image of a big spot. Amid the bad taste of my time I strive to go further than anyone else. It would have been I, had I lived in 1820, I "the bleeding nun," I who would not have spared this cunning and banal "let us conceal" whereof the parodical Cuisin speaks, it would have been I, I who would have reveled in the enormous metaphors, as he says, all phases of the "silver disk." For today I think of a castle, half of which is not necessarily in ruins; this castle belongs to me, I picture it in a rustic setting, not far from Paris. The outbuildings are too numerous to mention, and, as for the interior, it has been frightfully restored, in such manner as to leave nothing to be desired from the viewpoint of comfort. Automobiles are parked before the door, concealed by the shade of trees. A few of my friends are living here as permanent guests: there is Louis Aragon leaving; he only has time enough to say hello; Philippe Soupault gets up with the stars, and Paul Eluard, our great Eluard, has not yet come home. There are Robert Desnos and Roger Vitrac out on the grounds poring over an ancient edict on duelling; Georges Auric, Jean Paulhan; Max Morise, who rows so well, and Benjamin Péret, busy with his equations with birds; and Joseph Delteil; and Jean Carrive; and Georges Limbour, and Georges Limbours (there is a whole hedge of Georges Limbours); and Marcel Noll; there is T. Fraenkel waving to us from his captive balloon, Georges Malkine, Antonin Artaud, Francis Gérard, Pierre Naville, J.-A. Boiffard, and after them Jacques Baron and his brother, handsome and cordial, and so many others besides, and gorgeous women, I might add. Nothing is too good for these young men, their wishes are, as to wealth, so many commands. Francis Picabia comes to pay us a call, and last week, in the hall of mirrors, we received a certain Marcel Duchamp whom we had not hitherto known. Picasso goes hunting in the neighborhood. The spirit of demoralization has elected domicile in the castle, and it is with it we have to deal every time it is a question of contact with our fellowmen, but the doors are always open, and one does not begin by "thanking" everyone, you know. Moreover, the solitude is vast, we don't often run into one another. And anyway, isn't what matters that we be the masters of ourselves, the masters of women, and of love too?

I shall be proved guilty of poetic dishonesty: everyone will go parading about saying that I live on the rue Fontaine and that he will have none of the water that flows therefrom. To be sure! But is he certain that this castle into which I cordially invite him is an image? What if this castle really existed! My guests are there to prove it does; their whim is the luminous road that leads to it. We really live by our fantasies when we give free reign to them. And how could what one might do bother the other, there, safely sheltered from the sentimental pursuit and at the trysting place of opportunities?

Man proposes and disposes. He and he alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy. Poetry teaches him to. It bears within itself the perfect compensation for the miseries we endure. It can also be an organizer, if ever, as the result of a less intimate disappointment, we contemplate taking it seriously. The time is coming when it decrees the end of money and by itself will break the bread of heaven for the earth! There will still be gatherings on the public squares, and movements you never dared hope participate in. Farewell to absurd choices, the dreams of dark abyss, rivalries, the prolonged patience, the flight of the seasons, the artificial order of ideas, the ramp of danger, time for everything! May you only take the trouble to practice poetry. Is it not incumbent upon us, who are already living off it, to try and impose what we hold to be our case for further inquiry?

It matters not whether there is a certain disproportion between this defense and the illustration that will follow it. It was a question of going back to the sources of poetic imagination and, what is more, of remaining there. Not that I pretend to have done so. It requires a great deal of fortitude to try to set up one's abode in these distant regions where everything seems at first to be so awkward and difficult, all the more so if one wants to try to take someone there. Besides, one is never sure of really being there. If one is going to all that trouble, one might as well stop off somewhere else. Be that as it may, the fact is that the way to these regions is clearly marked, and that to attain the true goal is now merely a matter of the travelers' ability to endure.

We are all more or less aware of the road traveled. I was careful to relate, in the course of a study of the case of Robert Desnos entitled ENTRÉE DES MÉDIUMS,* (See Les Pas perdus, published by N.R.F.) that I had been led to" concentrate my attention on the more or less partial sentences which, when one is quite alone and on the verge of falling asleep, become perceptible for the mind without its being possible to discover what provoked them." I had then just attempted the poetic adventure with the minimum of risks, that is, my aspirations were the same as they are today but I trusted in the slowness of formulation to keep me from useless contacts, contacts of which I completely disapproved. This attitude involved a modesty of thought certain vestiges of which I still retain. At the end of my life, I shall doubtless manage to speak with great effort the way people speak, to apologize for my voice and my few remaining gestures. The virtue of the spoken word (and the written word all the more so) seemed to me to derive from the faculty of foreshortening in a striking manner the exposition (since there was exposition) of a small number of facts, poetic or other, of which I made myself the substance. I had come to the conclusion that Rimbaud had not proceeded any differently. I was composing, with a concern for variety that deserved better, the final poems of Mont de piété, that is, I managed to extract from the blank lines of this book an incredible advantage. These lines were the closed eye to the operations of thought that I believed I was obliged to keep hidden from the reader. It was not deceit on my part, but my love of shocking the reader. I had the illusion of a possible complicity, which I had more and more difficulty giving up. I had begun to cherish words excessively for the space they allow around them, for their tangencies with countless other words which I did not utter. The poem BLACK FOREST derives precisely from this state of mind. It took me six months to write it, and you may take my word for it that I did not rest a single day. But this stemmed from the opinion I had of myself in those days, which was high, please don't judge me too harshly. I enjoy these stupid confessions. At that point cubist pseudo-poetry was trying to get a foothold, but it had emerged defenseless from Picasso's brain, and I was thought to be as dull as dishwater (and still am). I had a sneaking suspicion, moreover, that from the viewpoint of poetry I was off on the wrong road, but I hedged my bet as best I could, defying lyricism with salvos of definitions and formulas (the Dada phenomena were waiting in the wings, ready to come on stage) and pretending to search for an application of poetry to advertising (I went so far as to claim that the world would end, not with a good book but with a beautiful advertisement for heaven or for hell).

In those days, a man at least as boring as I, Pierre Reverdy, was writing:
The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.
The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic reality...* ( Nord-Sud, March 1918)

These words, however sibylline for the uninitiated, were extremely revealing, and I pondered them for a long time. But the image eluded me. Reverdy's aesthetic, a completely a posteriori aesthetic, led me to mistake the effects for the causes. It was in the midst of all this that I renounced irrevocably my point of view.

One evening, therefore, before I fell asleep, I perceived, so clearly articulated that it was impossible to change a word, but nonetheless removed from the sound of any voice, a rather strange phrase which came to me without any apparent relationship to the events in which, my consciousness agrees, I was then involved, a phrase which seemed to me insistent, a phrase, if I may be so bold, which was knocking at the window. I took cursory note of it and prepared to move on when its organic character caught my attention. Actually, this phrase astonished me: unfortunately I cannot remember it exactly, but it was something like: "There is a man cut in two by the window," but there could be no question of ambiguity, accompanied as it was by the faint visual image* (Were I a painter, this visual depiction would doubtless have become more important for me than the other. It was most certainly my previous predispositions which decided the matter. Since that day, I have had occasion to concentrate my attention voluntarily on similar apparitions, and I know they are fully as clear as auditory phenomena. With a pencil and white sheet of paper to hand, I could easily trace their outlines. Here again it is not a matter of drawing, but simply of tracing. I could thus depict a tree, a wave, a musical instrument, all manner of things of which I am presently incapable of providing even the roughest sketch. I would plunge into it, convinced that I would find my way again, in a maze of lines which at first glance would seem to be going nowhere. And, upon opening my eyes, I would get the very strong impression of something "never seen." The proof of what I am saying has been provided many times by Robert Desnos: to be convinced, one has only to leaf through the pages of issue number 36 of Feuilles libres which contains several of his drawings ( Romeo and Juliet, A Man Died This Morning, etc.) which were taken by this magazine as the drawings of a madman and published as such.) of a man walking cut half way up by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body. Beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt, what I saw was the simple reconstruction in space of a man leaning out a window. But this window having shifted with the man, I realized that I was dealing with an image of a fairly rare sort, and all I could think of was to incorporate it into my material for poetic construction. No sooner had I granted it this capacity than it was in fact succeeded by a whole series of phrases, with only brief pauses between them, which surprised me only slightly less and left me with the impression of their being so gratuitous that the control I had then exercised upon myself seemed to me illusory and all I could think of was putting an end to the interminable quarrel raging within me.* (Knut Hamsum ascribes this sort of revelation to which I had been subjected as deriving from hunger, and he may not be wrong. (The fact is I did not eat every day during that period of my life). Most certainly the manifestations that he describes in these terms are clearly the same:

"The following day I awoke at an early hour. It was still dark. My eyes had been open for a long time when I heard the clock in the apartment above strike five. I wanted to go back to sleep, but I couldn't; I was wide awake and a thousand thoughts were crowding through my mind.

"Suddenly a few good fragments came to mind, quite suitable to be used in a rough draft, or serialized; all of a sudden I found, quite by chance, beautiful phrases, phrases such as I had never written. I repeated them to myself slowly, word by word; they were excellent. And there were still more coming. I got up and picked up a pencil and some paper that were on a table behind my bed. It was as though some vein had burst within me, one word followed another, found its proper place, adapted itself to the situation, scene piled upon scene, the action unfolded, one retort after another welled up in my mind, I was enjoying myself immensely. Thoughts came to me so rapidly and continued to flow so abundantly that I lost a whole host of delicate details, because my pencil could not keep up with them, and yet I went as fast as I could, my hand in constant motion, I did not lose a minute. The sentences continued to well up within me, I was pregnant with my subject."

Apollinaire asserted that Chirico's first paintings were done under the influence of cenesthesic disorders (migraines, colics, etc.).)

Completely occupied as I still was with Freud at that time, and familiar as I was with his methods of examination which I had some slight occasion to use on some patients during the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what we were trying to obtain from them, namely, a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of the critical faculties, a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken thought. It had seemed to me, and still does -- the way in which the phrase about the man cut in two had come to me is an indication of it -- that the speed of thought is no greater than the speed of speech, and that thought does not necessarily defy language, nor even the fast-moving pen. It was in this frame of mind that Philippe Soupault -- to whom I had confided these initial conclusions - and I decided to blacken some paper, with a praiseworthy disdain for what might result from a literary point of view. The ease of execution did the rest. By the end of the first day we were able to read to ourselves some fifty or so pages obtained in this manner, and begin to compare our results. All in all, Soupault's pages and mine proved to be remarkably similar: the same overconstruction, shortcomings of a similar nature, but also, on both our parts, the illusion of an extraordinary verve, a great deal of emotion, a considerable choice of images of a quality such that we would not have been capable of preparing a single one in longhand, a very special picturesque quality and, here and there, a strong comical effect. The only difference between our two texts seemed to me to derive essentially from our respective tempers. Soupault's being less static than mine, and, if he does not mind my offering this one slight criticism, from the fact that he had made the error of putting a few words by way of titles at the top of certain pages, I suppose in a spirit of mystification. On the other hand, I must give credit where credit is due and say that he constantly and vigorously opposed any effort to retouch or correct, however slightly, any passage of this kind which seemed to me unfortunate. In this he was, to be sure, absolutely right.* (I believe more and more in the infallibility of my thought with respect to myself, and this is too fair. Nonetheless, with this thought-writing, where one is at the mercy of the first outside distraction, "ebullutions" can occur. It would be inexcusable for us to pretend otherwise. By definition, thought is strong, and incapable of catching itself in error. The blame for these obvious weaknesses must be placed on suggestions that come to it from without.) It is, in fact, difficult to appreciate fairly the various elements present: one may even go so far as to say that it is impossible to appreciate them at a first reading. To you who write, these elements are, on the surface, as strange to you as they are to anyone else, and naturally you are wary of them. Poetically speaking, what strikes you about them above all is their extreme degree of immediate absurdity, the quality of this absurdity, upon closer scrutiny, being to give way to everything admissible, everything legitimate in the world: the disclosure of a certain number of properties and of facts no less objective, in the final analysis, than the others.

In homage to Guillaume Apollinaire, who had just died and who, on several occasions, seemed to us to have followed a discipline of this kind, without however having sacrificed to it any mediocre literary means, Soupault and I baptized the new mode of pure expression which we had at our disposal and which we wished to pass on to our friends, by the name of SURREALISM. I believe that there is no point today in dwelling any further on this word and that the meaning we gave it initially has generally prevailed over its Apollinarian sense. To be even fairer, we could probably have taken over the word SUPERNATURALISM employed by Gérard de Nerval in his dedication to the Filles de feu.* (And also by Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus ([Book III] Chapter VIII, "Natural Supernaturalism"), 1833-34.) It appears, in fact, that Nerval possessed to a tee the spirit with which we claim a kinship, Apollinaire having possessed, on the contrary, naught but the letter, still imperfect, of Surrealism, having shown himself powerless to give a valid theoretical idea of it. Here are two passages by Nerval which seem to me to be extremely significant in this respect:

I am going to explain to you, my dear Dumas, the phenomenon of which you have spoken a short while ago. There are, as you know, certain storytellers who cannot invent without identifying with the characters their imagination has dreamt up. You may recall how convincingly our old friend Nodier used to tell how it had been his misfortune during the Revolution to be guillotined; one became so completely convinced of what he was saying that one began to wonder how he had managed to have his head glued back on.

...And since you have been indiscreet enough to quote one of the sonnets composed in this SUPERNATURALISTIC dream-state, as the Germans would call it, you will have to hear them all. You will find them at the end of the volume. They are hardly any more obscure than Hegel's metaphysics or Swedenborg's MEMORABILIA, and would lose their charm if they were explained, if such were possible; at least admit the worth of the expression....** (See also L'Idéoréalisme by Saint-Pol-Roux.)

Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life. The following have performed acts of ABSOLUTE SURREALISM: Messrs. Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, Desnos, Eluard, Gérard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon, Soupault, Vitrac.

They seem to be, up to the present time, the only ones, and there would be no ambiguity about it were it not for the case of Isidore Ducasse, about whom I lack information. And, of course, if one is to judge them only superficially by their results, a good number of poets could pass for Surrealists, beginning with Dante and, in his finer moments, Shakespeare. In the course of the various attempts I have made to reduce what is, by breach of trust, called genius, I have found nothing which in the final analysis can be attributed to any other method than that.

Young's Nights are Surrealist from one end to the other; unfortunately it is a priest who is speaking, a bad priest no doubt, but a priest nonetheless.

Swift is Surrealist in malice,

Sade is Surrealist in sadism.

Chateaubriand is Surrealist in exoticism.

Constant is Surrealist in politics.

Hugo is Surrealist when he isn't stupid.

Desbordes-Valmore is Surrealist in love.

Bertrand is Surrealist in the past.

Rabbe is Surrealist in death.

Poe is Surrealist in adventure.

Baudelaire is Surrealist in morality.

Rimbaud is Surrealist in the way he lived, and elsewhere.

Mallarmé is Surrealist when he is confiding.

Jarry is Surrealist in absinthe.

Nouveau is Surrealist in the kiss.

Saint-Pol-Roux is Surrealist in his use of symbols.

Fargue is Surrealist in the atmosphere.

Vaché is Surrealist in me.

Reverdy is Surrealist at home.

Saint-Jean-Perse is Surrealist at a distance.

Roussel is Surrealist as a storyteller.

Etc.

I would like to stress the point: they are not always Surrealists, in that I discern in each of them a certain number of preconceived ideas to which -- very naively! -- they hold. They hold to them because they had not heard the Surrealist voice, the one that continues to preach on the eve of death and above the storms, because they did not want to serve simply to orchestrate the marvelous score. They were instruments too full of pride, and this is why they have not always produced a harmonious sound.* (I could say the same of a number of philosophers and painters, including, among the latter, Uccello, from painters of the past, and, in the modern era, Seurat, Gustave Moreau, Matisse (in "La Musique," for example), Derain, Picasso, (by far the most pure), Braque, Duchamp, Picabia, Chirico (so admirable for so long), Klee, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and, one so close to us, André Masson.)

But we, who have made no effort whatsoever to filter, who in our works have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording instruments who are not mesmerized by the drawings we are making, perhaps we serve an even nobler cause. Thus do we render with integrity the "talent" which has been lent to us. You might as well speak of the talent of this platinum ruler, this mirror, this door, and of the sky, if you like.

We do not have any talent; ask Philippe Soupault:
"Anatomical products of manufacture and low-income dwellings will destroy the tallest cities."
Ask Roger Vitrac:
"No sooner had I called forth the marble-admiral than he turned on his heel like a horse which rears at the sight of the North star and showed me, in the plane of his two-pointed cocked hat, a region where I was to spend my life."
Ask Paul Eluard:
"This is an oft-told tale that I tell, a famous poem that I reread: I am leaning against a wall, with my verdant ears and my lips burned to a crisp."
Ask Max Morise:
"The bear of the caves and his friend the bittern, the vol-au-vent and his valet the wind, the Lord Chancellor with his Lady, the scarecrow for sparrows and his accomplice the sparrow, the test tube and his daughter the needle, this carnivore and his brother the carnival, the sweeper and his monocle, the Mississippi and its little dog, the coral and its jug of milk, the Miracle and its Good Lord, might just as well go and disappear from the surface of the sea."
Ask Joseph Delteil:
"Alas! I believe in the virtue of birds. And a feather is all it takes to make me die laughing."
Ask Louis Aragon:
"During a short break in the party, as the players were gathering around a bowl of flaming punch, I asked a tree if it still had its red ribbon."
And ask me, who was unable to keep myself from writing the serpentine, distracting lines of this preface.

Ask Robert Desnos, he who, more than any of us, has perhaps got closest to the Surrealist truth, he who, in his still unpublished works* (NOUVELLES HÉBRIDES, DÉSORDRE FORMEL, DEUIL POUR DEUIL.) and in the course of the numerous experiments he has been a party to, has fully justified the hope I placed in Surrealism and leads me to believe that a great deal more will still come of it. Desnos speaks Surrealist at will. His extraordinary agility in orally following his thought is worth as much to us as any number of splendid speeches which are lost, Desnos having better things to do than record them. He reads himself like an open book, and does nothing to retain the pages, which fly away in the windy wake of his life.

SECRETS OF THE MAGICAL

SURREALIST ART
Written Surrealist composition or first and last draft
After you have settled yourself in a place as favorable as possible to the concentration of your mind upon itself, have writing materials brought to you. Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything. Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you're writing and be tempted to reread what you have written. The first sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling is the truth that with every passing second there is a sentence unknown to our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard. It is somewhat of a problem to form an opinion about the next sentence; it doubtless partakes both of our conscious activity and of the other, if one agrees that the fact of having written the first entails a minimum of perception. This should be of no importance to you, however; to a large extent, this is what is most interesting and intriguing about the Surrealist game. The fact still remains that punctuation no doubt resists the absolute continuity of the flow with which we are concerned, although it may seem as necessary as the arrangement of knots in a vibrating cord. Go on as long as you like. Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur. If silence threatens to settle in if you should ever happen to make a mistake -- a mistake, perhaps due to carelessness -- break off without hesitation with an overly clear line. Following a word the origin of which seems suspicious to you, place any letter whatsoever, the letter "l" for example, always the letter "l," and bring the arbitrary back by making this letter the first of the following word.
How not to be bored any longer when with others
This is very difficult. Don't be at home for anyone, and occasionally, when no one has forced his way in, interrupting you in the midst of your Surrealist activity, and you, crossing your arms, say: "It doesn't matter, there are doubtless better things to do or not do. Interest in life is indefensible Simplicity, what is going on inside me, is still tiresome to me!" or an other revolting banality.
To make speeches
Just prior to the elections, in the first country which deems it worthwhile to proceed in this kind of public expression of opinion, have yourself put on the ballot. Each of us has within himself the potential of an orator: multicolored loin cloths, glass trinkets of words. Through Surrealism he will take despair unawares in its poverty. One night, on a stage, he will, by himself, carve up the eternal heaven, that Peau de l'ours. He will promise so much that any promises he keeps will be a source of wonder and dismay. In answer to the claims of an entire people he will give a partial and ludicrous vote. He will make the bitterest enemies partake of a secret desire which will blow up the countries. And in this he will succeed simply by allowing himself to be moved by the immense word which dissolves into pity and revolves in hate. Incapable of failure, he will play on the velvet of all failures. He will be truly elected, and women will love him with an all-consuming passion.
To write false novels
Whoever you may be, if the spirit moves you burn a few laurel leaves and, without wishing to tend this meager fire, you will begin to write a novel. Surrealism will allow you to: all you have to do is set the needle marked "fair" at "action," and the rest will follow naturally. Here are some characters rather different in appearance; their names in your handwriting are a question of capital letters, and they will conduct themselves with the same ease with respect to active verbs as does the impersonal pronoun "it" with respect to words such as "is raining," "is," "must," etc. They will command them, so to speak, and wherever observation, reflection, and the faculty of generalization prove to be of no help to you, you may rest assured that they will credit you with a thousand intentions you never had. Thus endowed with a tiny number of physical and moral characteristics, these beings who in truth owe you so little will thereafter deviate not one iota from a certain line of conduct about which you need not concern yourself any further. Out of this will result a plot more or less clever in appearance, justifying point by point this moving or comforting denouement about which you couldn't care less. Your false novel will simulate to a marvelous degree a real novel; you will be rich, and everyone will agree that "you've really got a lot of guts," since it's also in this region that this something is located.

Of course, by an analogous method, and provided you ignore what you are reviewing, you can successfully devote yourself to false literary criticism.
How to catch the eye of a woman you pass in the street Against death
Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality.

Language has been given to man so that he may make Surrealist use of it. To the extent that he is required to make himself understood, he manages more or less to express himself, and by so doing to fulfill certain functions culled from among the most vulgar. Speaking, reading a letter, present no real problem for him, provided that, in so doing, he does not set himself a goal above the mean, that is, provided he confines himself to carrying on a conversation (for the pleasure of conversing) with someone. He is not worried about the words that are going to come, nor about the sentence which will follow after the sentence he is just completing. To a very simple question, he will be capable of making a lightning-like reply. In the absence of minor tics acquired through contact with others, he can without any ado offer an opinion on a limited number of subjects; for that he does not need to "count up to ten" before speaking or to formulate anything whatever ahead of time. Who has been able to convince him that this faculty of the first draft will only do him a disservice when he makes up his mind to establish more delicate relationships? There is no subject about which he should refuse to talk, to write about prolifically. All that results from listening to oneself, from reading what one has written, is the suspension of the occult, that admirable help. I am in no hurry to understand myself (basta! I shall always understand myself). If such and such a sentence of mine turns out to be somewhat disappointing, at least momentarily, I place my trust in the following sentence to redeem its sins; I carefully refrain from starting it over again or polishing it. The only thing that might prove fatal to me would be the slightest loss of impetus. Words, groups of words which follow one another, manifest among themselves the greatest solidarity. It is not up to me to favor one group over the other. It is up to a miraculous equivalent to intervene -- and intervene it does.

Not only does this unrestricted language, which I am trying to render forever valid, which seems to me to adapt itself to all of life's circumstances, not only does this language not deprive me of any of my means, on the contrary it lends me an extraordinary lucidity, and it does so in an area where I least expected it. I shall even go so far as to maintain that it instructs me and, indeed, I have had occasion to use surreally words whose meaning I have forgotten. I was subsequently able to verify that the way in which I had used them corresponded perfectly with their definition. This would leave one to believe that we do not "learn," that all we ever do is "relearn." There are felicitous turns of speech that I have thus familiarized myself with. And I am not talking about the poetic consciousness of objects which I have been able to acquire only after a spiritual contact with them repeated a thousand times over.

The forms of Surrealist language adapt themselves best to dialogue. Here, two thoughts confront each other; while one is being delivered, the other is busy with it; but how is it busy with it? To assume that it incorporates it within itself would be tantamount to admitting that there is a time during which it is possible for it to live completely off that other thought, which is highly unlikely. And, in fact, the attention it pays is completely exterior; it has only time enough to approve or reject -- generally reject -- with all the consideration of which man is capable. This mode of language, moreover, does not allow the heart of the matter to be plumbed. My attention, prey to an entreaty which it cannot in all decency reject, treats the opposing thought as an enemy; in ordinary conversation, it "takes it up" almost always on the words, the figures of speech, it employs; it puts me in a position to turn it to good advantage in my reply by distorting them. This is true to such a degree that in certain pathological states of mind, where the sensorial disorders occupy the patient's complete attention, he limits himself, while continuing to answer the questions, to seizing the last word spoken in his presence or the last portion of the Surrealist sentence some trace of which he finds in his mind.

Q. "How old are you?" A. "You." (Echolalia.)

Q. "What is your name?" A. "Forty-five houses." (Ganser syndrome, or beside-the-point replies.)

There is no conversation in which some trace of this disorder does not occur. The effort to be social which dictates it and the considerable practice we have at it are the only things which enable us to conceal it temporarily. It is also the great weakness of the book that it is in constant conflict with its best, by which I mean the most demanding, readers. In the very short dialogue that I concocted above between the doctor and the madman, it was in fact the madman who got the better of the exchange. Because, through his replies, he obtrudes upon the attention of the doctor examining him -- and because he is not the person asking the questions. Does this mean that his thought at this point is stronger? Perhaps. He is free not to care any longer about his age or name.

Poetic Surrealism, which is the subject of this study, has focused its efforts up to this point on reestablishing dialogue in its absolute truth, by freeing both interlocutors from any obligations and politeness. Each of them simply pursues his soliloquy without trying to derive any special dialectical pleasure from it and without trying to impose anything whatsoever upon his neighbor. The remarks exchanged are not, as is generally the case, meant to develop some thesis, however unimportant it may be; they are as disaffected as possible. As for the reply that they elicit, it is, in principle, totally indifferent to the personal pride of the person speaking. The words, the images are only so many springboards for the mind of the listener. In Les Champs magnétiques, the first purely Surrealist work, this is the way in which the pages grouped together under the title Barrières must be conceived of -- pages wherein Soupault and I show ourselves to be impartial interlocutors.

Surrealism does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like. There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do; like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts. It also is, if you like, an artificial paradise, and the taste one has for it derives from Baudelaire's criticism for the same reason as the others. Thus the analysis of the mysterious effects and special pleasures it can produce -- in many respects Surrealism occurs as a new vice which does not necessarily seem to be restricted to the happy few; like hashish, it has the ability to satisfy all manner of tastes -- such an analysis has to be included in the present study.

1. It is true of Surrealist images as it is of opium images that man does not evoke them; rather they "come to him spontaneously, despotically. He cannot chase them away; for the will is powerless now and no longer controls the faculties."* (Baudelaire.) It remains to be seen whether images have ever been "evoked." If one accepts, as I do, Reverdy's definition it does not seem possible to bring together, voluntarily, what he calls "two distant realities." The juxtaposition is made or not made, and that is the long and the short of it. Personally, I absolutely refuse to believe that, in Reverdy's work, images such as
In the brook, there is a song that flows
or:
Day unfolded like a white tablecloth
or:
The world goes back into a sack
reveal the slightest degree of premeditation. In my opinion, it is erroneous to claim that "the mind has grasped the relationship" of two realities in the presence of each other. First of all, it has seized nothing consciously. It is, as it were, from the fortuitous juxtaposition of the two terms that a particular light has sprung, the light of the image, to which we are infinitely sensitive. The value of the image depends upon the beauty of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function of the difference of potential between the two conductors. When the difference exists only slightly, as in a comparison,* (Compare the image in the work of Jules Renard.) the spark is lacking. Now, it is not within man's power, so far as I can tell, to effect the juxtaposition of two realities so far apart. The principle of the association of ideas, such as we conceive of it, militates against it. Or else we would have to revert to an elliptical art, which Reverdy deplores as much as I. We are therefore obliged to admit that the two terms of the image are not deduced one from the other by the mind for the specific purpose of producing the spark, that they are the simultaneous products of the activity I call Surrealist, reason's role being limited to taking note of, and appreciating, the luminous phenomenon.

And just as the length of the spark increases to the extent that it occurs in rarefied gases, the Surrealist atmosphere created by automatic writing, which I have wanted to put within the reach of everyone, is especially conducive to the production of the most beautiful images. One can even go so far as to say that in this dizzying race the images appear like the only guideposts of the mind. By slow degrees the mind becomes convinced of the supreme reality of these images. At first limiting itself to submitting to them, it soon realizes that they flatter its reason, and increase its knowledge accordingly. The mind becomes aware of the limitless expanses wherein its desires are made manifest, where the pros and cons are constantly consumed, where its obscurity does not betray it. It goes forward, borne by these images which enrapture it, which scarcely leave it any time to blow upon the fire in its fingers. This is the most beautiful night of all, the lightning-filled night: day, compared to it, is night.

The countless kinds of Surrealist images would require a classification which I do not intend to make today. To group them according to their particular affinities would lead me far afield; what I basically want to mention is their common virtue. For me, their greatest virtue, I must confess, is the one that is arbitrary to the highest degree, the one that takes the longest time to translate into practical language, either because it contains an immense amount of seeming contradiction or because one of its terms is strangely concealed; or because, presenting itself as something sensational, it seems to end weakly (because it suddenly closes the angle of its compass), or because it derives from itself a ridiculous formal justification, or because it is of a hallucinatory kind, or because it very naturally gives to the abstract the mask of the concrete, or the opposite, or because it implies the negation of some elementary physical property, or because it provokes laughter. Here, in order, are a few examples of it:

The ruby of champagne. (LAUTRÉAMONT)

Beautiful as the law of arrested development of the breast in adults, whose propensity to growth is not in proportion to the quantity of molecules that their organism assimilates. (LAUTRÉAMONT)

A church stood dazzling as a bell. (PHILIPPE SOUPAULT)

In Rrose Sélavy's sleep there is a dwarf issued from a well who comes to eat her bread at night. (ROBERT DESNOS)

On the bridge the dew with the head of a tabby cat lulls itself to sleep. (ANDRÉ BRETON)

A little to the left, in my firmament foretold, I see -- but it's doubtless but a mist of blood and murder -- the gleaming glass of liberty's disturbances. (LOUIS ARAGON)
In the forest aflame
The lions were fresh. (ROBERT VITRAC)
The color of a woman's stockings is not necessarily in the likeness of her eyes, which led a philosopher who it is pointless to mention, to say: "Cephalopods have more reasons to hate progress than do quadrupeds."
(MAX MORISE)

1st. Whether we like it or not, there is enough there to satisfy several demands of the mind. All these images seem to attest to the fact that the mind is ripe for something more than the benign joys it allows itself in general. This is the only way it has of turning to its own advantage the ideal quantity of events with which it is entrusted.* (Let us no forget that, according to Novalis' formula, "there are series of events which run parallel to real events. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of circumstances, so that is seems imperfect; and their consequences are also equally imperfect. Thus it was with the Reformation; instead of Protestantism, we got Lutheranism.") These images show it the extent of its ordinary dissipation and the drawbacks that it offers for it. In the final analysis, it's not such a bad thing for these images to upset the mind, for to upset the mind is to put it in the wrong. The sentences I quote make ample provision for this. But the mind which relishes them draws therefrom the conviction that it is on the right track; on its own, the mind is incapable of finding itself guilty of cavil; it has nothing to fear, since, moreover, it attempts to embrace everything.

2nd. The mind which plunges into Surrealism relives with glowing excitement the best part of its childhood. For such a mind, it is similar to the certainty with which a person who is drowning reviews once more, in the space of less than a second, all the insurmountable moments of his life. Some may say to me that the parallel is not very encouraging. But I have no intention of encouraging those who tell me that. From childhood memories, and from a few others, there emanates a sentiment of being unintegrated, and then later of having gone astray, which I hold to be the most fertile that exists. It is perhaps childhood that comes closest to one's "real life"; childhood beyond which man has at his disposal, aside from his laissez-passer, only a few complimentary tickets; childhood where everything nevertheless conspires to bring about the effective, risk-free possession of oneself. Thanks to Surrealism, it seems that opportunity knocks a second time. It is as though we were still running toward our salvation, or our perdition. In the shadow we again see a precious terror. Thank God, it's still only Purgatory. With a shudder, we cross what the occultists call dangerous territory. In my wake I raise up monsters that are lying in wait; they are not yet too ill-disposed toward me, and I am not lost, since I fear them. Here are "the elephants with the heads of women and the flying lions" which used to make Soupault and me tremble in our boots to meet, here is the "soluble fish" which still frightens me slightly. POISSON SOLUBLE, am I not the soluble fish, I was born under the sign of Pisces, and man is soluble in his thought! The flora and fauna of Surrealism are inadmissible.

3rd. I do not believe in the establishment of a conventional Surrealist pattern any time in the near future. The characteristics common to all the texts of this kind, including those I have just cited and many others which alone could offer us a logical analysis and a careful grammatical analysis, do not preclude a certain evolution of Surrealist prose in time. Coming on the heels of a large number of essays I have written in this vein over the past five years, most of which I am indulgent enough to think are extremely disordered, the short anecdotes which comprise the balance of this volume offer me a glaring proof of what I am saying. I do not judge them to be any more worthless, because of that, in portraying for the reader the benefits which the Surrealist contribution is liable to make to his consciousness.

Surrealist methods would, moreover, demand to be

heard. Everything is valid when it comes to obtaining the desired suddenness from certain associations. The pieces of paper that Picasso and Braque insert into their work have the same value as the introduction of a platitude into a literary analysis of the most rigorous sort. It is even permissible to entitle POEM what we get from the most random assemblage possible (observe, if you will, the syntax) of headlines and scraps of headlines cut out of the newspapers:
POEM A burst of laughter The most beautiful straws HAVE A FADED COLOR UNDER THE LOCKS on an isolated farm FROM DAY TO DAY the pleasant grows worse coffee preaches for its saint THE DAILY ARTISAN OF YOUR BEAUTY M ADAM , a pair of silk stockings is not A leap into space A STAG Love above all Everything could be worked out so well PARIS IS A BIG VILLAGE THE PRAYER K now that have finished their task short and sweet THE FIRST WHITE PAPER Red will be in memory AT THE SUITORS' BALL I do as I dance And we could offer many many more examples. The theater, philosophy, science, criticism would all succeed in finding their bearings there. I hasten to add that future Surrealist techniques do not interest me. Far more serious, in my opinion* (Whatever reservations I may be allowed to make concerning responsibility in general and the medico-legal considerations which determine an individual's degree of responsibility -- complete responsibility, irresponsibility, limited responsibility (sic) -- however difficult it may be for me to accept the principle of any kind of responsibility, I would like to know how the first punishable offenses, the Surrealist character of which will be clearly apparent, will be judged. Will the accused be acquitted, or will he merely be given the benefit of the doubt because of extenuating circumstances? It's a shame that the violation of the laws governing the Press is today scarcely repressed, for if it were not we would soon see a trial of this sort: the accused has published a book which is an outrage to public decency. Several of his "most respected and honorable" fellow citizens have lodged a complaint against him, and he is also charged with slander and libel. There are also all sorts of other charges against him, such as insulting and defaming the army, inciting to murder, rape, etc. The accused, moreover, wastes no time in agreeing with the accusers in "stigmatizing" most of the ideas expressed. His only defense is claiming that he does not consider himself to be the author of his book, said book being no more and no less than a Surrealist concoction which precludes any question of merit or lack of merit on the part of the person who signs it; further, that all he has done is copy a document without offering any opinion thereon, and that he is at least as foreign to the accused text as is the presiding judge himself. What is true for the publication of a book will also hold true for a whole host of other acts as soon as Surrealist methods begin to enjoy widespread favor. When that happens, a new morality must be substituted for the prevailing morality, the source of all our trials and tribulations.) -- I have intimated it often enough -- are the applications of Surrealism to action. To be sure, I do not believe in the prophetic nature of the Surrealist word. "It is the oracle, the things I say."* (Rimbaud.) Yes, as much as I like, but what of the oracle itself?** (Still, STILL.... We must absolutely get to the bottom of this. Today, June 8, 1924, about one o'clock, the voice whispered to me: "Béthune, Béthune." What did it mean? I have never been to Béthune, and have only the vaguest notion as to where it is located on the map of France. Béthune evokes nothing for me, not even a scene from The Three Musketeers. I should have left for Béthune, where perhaps there was something awaiting me; that would have been to simple, really. Someone told me they had read in a book by Chesterton about a detective who, in order to find someone he is looking for in a certain city, simply scoured from roof to cellar the houses which, from the outside, seemed somehow abnormal to him, were it only in some slight detail. This system is as good as any other. Similarly, in 1919, Soupault went into any number of impossible buildings to ask the concierge whether Philippe Soupault did in fact live there. He would not have been surprised, I suspect, by an affirmative reply. He would have gone and knocked on his door.) Men's piety does not fool me. The Surrealist voice that shook Cumae, Dodona, and Delphi is nothing more than the voice which dictates my less irascible speeches to me. My time must not be its time, why should this voice help me resolve the childish problem of my destiny? I pretend, unfortunately, to act in a world where, in order to take into account its suggestions, I would be obliged to resort to two kinds of interpreters, one to translate its judgements for me, the other, impossible to find, to transmit to my fellow men whatever sense I could make out of them. This world, in which I endure what I endure (don't go see), this modern world, I mean, what the devil do you want me to do with it? Perhaps the Surrealist voice will be stilled, I have given up trying to keep track of those who have disappeared. I shall no longer enter into, however briefly, the marvelous detailed description of my years and my days. I shall be like Nijinski who was taken last year to the Russian ballet and did not realize what spectacle it was he was seeing. I shall be alone, very alone within myself, indifferent to all the world's ballets. What I have done, what I have left undone, I give it to you. And ever since I have had a great desire to show forbearance to scientific musing, however unbecoming, in the final analysis, from every point of view. Radios? Fine. Syphilis? If you like. Photography? I don't see any reason why not. The cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms. War? Gave us a good laugh. The telephone? Hello. Youth? Charming white hair. Try to make me say thank you: "Thank you." Thank you. If the common man has a high opinion of things which properly speaking belong to the realm of the laboratory, it is because such research has resulted in the manufacture of a machine or the discovery of some serum which the man in the street views as affecting him directly. He is quite sure that they have been trying to improve his lot. I am not quite sure to what extent scholars are motivated by humanitarian aims, but it does not seem to me that this factor constitutes a very marked degree of goodness. I am, of course, referring to true scholars and not to the vulgarizers and popularizers of all sorts who take out patents. In this realm as in any other, I believe in the pure Surrealist joy of the man who, forewarned that all others before him have failed, refuses to admit defeat, sets off from whatever point he chooses, along any other path save a reasonable one, and arrives wherever he can. Such and such an image, by which he deems it opportune to indicate his progress and which may result, perhaps, in his receiving public acclaim, is to me, I must confess, a matter of complete indifference. Nor is the material with which he must perforce encumber himself; his glass tubes or my metallic feathers... As for his method, I am willing to give it as much credit as I do mine. I have seen the inventor of the cutaneous plantar reflex at work; he manipulated his subjects without respite, it was much more than an "examination" he was employing; it was obvious that he was following no set plan. Here and there he formulated a remark, distantly, without nonetheless setting down his needle, while his hammer was never still. He left to others the futile task of curing patients. He was wholly consumed by and devoted to that sacred fever. Surrealism, such as I conceive of it, asserts our complete nonconformism clearly enough so that there can be no question of translating it, at the trial of the real world, as evidence for the defense. It could, on the contrary, only serve to justify the complete state of distraction which we hope to achieve here below. Kant's absentmindedness regarding women, Pasteur's absentmindedness about "grapes," Curie's absentmindedness with respect to vehicles, are in this regard profoundly symptomatic. This world is only very relatively in tune with thought, and incidents of this kind are only the most obvious episodes of a war in which I am proud to be participating. "Ce monde n'est que très relativement à la mesure de la pensée et les incidents de ce genre ne sont que les épisodes jusqu'ici les plus marquants d'une guerre d'indépendence à laquelle je me fais gloire de participer." Surrealism is the "invisible ray" which will one day enable us to win out over our opponents. "You are no longer trembling, carcass." This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.

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UbuWeb Papers: André Breton - Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)

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real life, I mean - that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!).

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Surrealist Manifesto - Andre Breton (1924) Audiobook

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Surrealist Manifesto - Andre Breton (1924) Audiobook

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Surrealist Manifesto - Andre Breton (1924) Audiobook

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Julian Hooper is becoming increasingly well known for his highly individual paintings, which draw upon a store of personal memory and imagery.

While moving close to contemporary abstraction and traditional painting territories, Julian's work is unique and often surprising. Hoopers images evolve gradually in the process of painting. By adding, editing, over-painting and erasing, forms travel away from their initial meaning and start to refer to something else. This contributes an expressive or surreal quality to the work. While he develops a relationship to the work as it evolves, the viewer finds the finished work unfolding in a similar way.

Julian is based in Auckland, New Zealand. He is of mixed English, Hungarian and Tongan heritage. Julian received a BFA from the University of Auckland 1989, and an MFA from RMIT, Melbourne in 1999. In 2000 he took up a six-month residency position at ISCP New York and continued living in New York for three years. He has exhibited extensively in New Zealand and Australia since 1990. Recently his work was included in Necessary Distraction: A Painting Show, at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. Hooper’s work is in major museum collections throughout New Zealand and Australia, including Auckland City Art Gallery, the Chartwell Collection, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and the University of Auckland and Queensland Art Gallery.

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