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The Palace of Curtains, III (1928) is one in a series of paintings by René Magritte that explores the resonances between words and images. Two polygons with nearly identical profiles lean against a wood-paneled wall. Each shape frames a depiction of sky, one with a painted representation, the other with language (the French word ciel, meaning sky).
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: René Magritte, The Palace of Curtains III
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Elastic Shapes with Dali-esque shadows litter Tanguy’s landscape, like the paradoxical meeting of unrelated materials in the painting’s title. According to the poet, John Ashbery, the self-taught artist chose titles arbitrarily, sometimes asking friends for suggestions.
Painted in 1940, The Satin Tuning Fork is part of the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
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Little is known about Costo Archillopoulo, the designer of this table (circa 1934), which is both a functional piece of furniture and a fantastical Surrealist sculpture. The glass tabletop rests improbably atop small balls balanced on the tips of three delicately tapering fingers, generating a sensation of tension and unease.
Disembodied hands and gloves are recurrent motifs in Surrealist art, with the left hand, in particular, symbolizing the irrational. The cloudlike element from which the hand emerges also suggests a transition from the conscious to the subconscious world.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
Installation Views
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Painted in the summer of 1929, The Accommodations of Desire is a small gem that deals with the twenty-five-year-old Dalí’s sexual anxieties over a love affair with an older, married woman. The woman, Gala, then the wife of Surrealist poet Paul Éluard, became Dalí’s lifelong muse and mate. In this picture, which Dalí painted after taking a walk alone with Gala, he included seven enlarged pebbles on which he envisioned what lay ahead for him:
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Salvador Dali, The Accommodations of Desire
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A red wooden gate affixed to the painted surface opens onto a painted scene dominated by blue sky. At left, a female figure brandishes a small knife; another falls limp in a swoon; a man atop the roof carries off a third, his hand outstretched to grab a real knob fastened to the frame. The title of the work (inscribed at the base), was inspired by a fever dream the young Max Ernst experienced while in bed with measles.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Max Ernst, Two Children Are Threatened By a Nightingale