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Painted in Sedona, Arizona in 1947, Witnesses originates in a pivotal moment of Dorothy Tanning’s career, when she turned inward, translating the psychological imperatives of Surrealism into interior worlds shaped by ambiguity and concealment. The painting presents a crowded, deliberately compressed interior populated by uncanny, quasi-human figures whose anatomy resist stable definition.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Dorothea Tanning, Temoins Du Drame (Witnesses)
Photo By Gail
Marshall Thompson was proud of his toad hole and very comfortable with his favorite toad, Maxwell. Maxwell or “Maxie” as Marshall referred to him, enjoyed his time massaging his human’s brain with his feet and keeping his mind at ease with calm croaking vibrations. It was a tradition; part biological and part magical that skips a generation in the Thompson family line.
Continue reading Thompson’s Toad Hole By Travis Louie
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There’s something undeniably arresting about encountering a giant, disembodied eye in the middle of the city —e specially one that seems to be watching from all directions at once. Installed near the iconic Flatiron Building in the Flatiron District, Charlotte Colbert’s Dreamland Sirens (2025) transforms a familiar urban crossroads into something far more surreal.
Continue reading Charlotte Colbert’s Dreamland Sirens in the Flatiron District
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Let’s take a look at a painting that feels less like a traditional artwork and more like a window into a dream. Created by French Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, Extinction of Useless Lights (1927) invites viewers into a mysterious landscape where logic takes a back seat and imagination takes the wheel.
Tanguy was a key figure in Surrealism, which explored dreams, the subconscious, and the strange imagery that exists beyond everyday reality. Interestingly, he was largely self-taught as an artist. After encountering the ideas of Surrealist leader André Breton in the 1920s, Tanguy quickly developed a visual style that would become unmistakably his own. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Extinction of Useless Lights By Yves Tanguy
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Decades after completing his most famous painting — a depiction of a pipe inscribed This is Not a Pipe — Rene Magritte here revisits this iconography with The Shadows (1966). The same masculine- identified object covers ominously behind a tree, inspired by a Surrealist play with arbitrary scale, and what the artist would term the “logic“ of dreams.
Photographed in the San Diego Museum of Art.