Dorothea Tanning (August 25, 1910 – January 31, 2012) was an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer and poet. Her early work was influenced by Surrealism, and she was the 4th and final wife of famous German surrealist Max Ernst (1891 – 1976).
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: On Time Off Time By Dorothea Tanning
Photo By Gail
Man Ray (1890 – 1976) was a consummate avant-garde artist who often incorporated everyday materials in his work and embraced chance and accident. In this piece, originally created in 1923, and tiled Object to Be Destroyed, Man Ray places a photographic eye on the ticking wand of a metronome to make an object at once mechanical and human, quotidian and bizarre. The use of found objects aligns the work with Dada, while the psychological resonance of the eye points to themes that would become important to Surrealism, officially founded a year later in 1924. Man Ray remade the present version in 1963, six years after the original was destroyed at an exhibition. He wryly re-titled it Indestructible Object to reflect its seemingly indestructible nature.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Photo By Gail
South of Scranton (1931) gathers various scenes that artist Peter Blume (1906 – 1992) encountered during an extended road trip in the spring of 1930. Setting out from his residence in Pawling, New York, Blume drove through the coalfields of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and then headed south toward the steel mills of Bethlehem. Blume then traveled further south to Charleston, South Carolina, where he witnessed several sailors performing acrobatic exercises aboard the deck of a German cruiser ship in the harbor. In an account of the painting’s origins, the artist stated, “As I tried to weld my impressions into the picture, they lost all their logical connections. I moved Scranton into Charleston, and Bethlehem into Scranton, as people do in a dream.” Blume’s crisp technique heightens the painting’s surreal appearance.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Photo By Gail
One of the most prominent women associated with Surrealism in the United States, Kay Sage (1898 – 1963) made this work after a five-month hiatus from painting following the sudden death of her husband Yves Tanguy. Like many Surrealists, she utilized landscape imagery as a metaphor for the mind and psychological states of being. Rendered in somber gray tones, Tomorrow is Never (1955) combines motifs that appear often in the later stages of her career, including architectural scaffolding, latticework structures, and draped figures, to evoke feelings of entrapment and dislocation. The painting is one of Sage’s last large works before her suicide in 1963.
Tomorrow is Never is Part of the Permanent Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Photo By Gail
Salvador Dalí utilized his theory of “nuclear mysticism,” a fusion of Catholicism, mathematics, and science, to create this unusual interpretation of Christ’s crucifixion. Levitating before a hypercube — a geometric, multidimensional form — Christ’s body is healthy, athletic, and bears no signs of torture; the crown of thorns and nails are missing.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) By Salvador Dali