To create the spiraling, anthropomorphic figures seeing in Memnon and The Butterflies (1942), Kurt Seligmann traced patterns of cracked glass that he projected onto his canvas. He was inspired by the vast open terrain of the American Southwest and elements from European mythology to create what he described, as psychological, “cyclonic“ landscapes where “living being seem to detach themselves from torturous geological formations. A world in formation – not the heroic landscapes of prehistory, but rather a lyrical one.” Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Kurt Seligmann, Memnon and The Butterflies→
In the early 1970s, Meret Oppenheim (1913 – 1985) began enthusiastically making collages. Octopus’s Garden (1971) is among the largest and most spectacular of those. This work depicts a fantastical underwater landscape, complete with calcified coral forms, trails of bubbles, and cut-out reproductions of peacock feathers. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Meret Oppenheim, Octopus’s Garden→
Katherine “Kay” Sage (1898 – 1963) came from a wealthy American family. In 1937, she moved to Paris intending to establish herself as an artist. Inspired by Surrealism, she became friendly with Yves Tanguy, whom she married in 1940. Sage was very attracted by the work of Giorgio De Chirico and this influenced her early works. As with her husband, she was drawn to depicting remote landscapes with a far horizon devoid of human figures. Her paintings only rarely show human figures and these are usually wrapped or enveloped in cloth. Thus, we see the The Fourteen Daggers (1942) with two wrapped figures set in a De Chirico metaphysical space. Sage did fewer new paintings after Tanguy’s death in 1955, partly because of her depression and partly because of her decreasing eyesight due to cataracts. Sadly, she took her own life in 1963.
Photographed in The American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan.
After retiring from the footwear trade in 1935, Morris Hirshfield turned to the pursuit he had always dreamed of: painting. One of his first pictures, Angora Cat (1937), was painted on top of a pre-existing painting that his wife Henriette had framed and hung in their apartment in Bensonhurst Brooklyn. If you look closely, you can see that part of the underlying picture — the lion figurine displayed on the background wall — remains visible. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Morris Hirshfield, Angora Cat→
Helen Lundeberg (1908 – 1999) organized a group of California artists, the only interwar Surrealist group in the United States. The “Post Surrealists,” as they were called, bypassed automatism and dream imagery in favor of provocative juxtapositions and careful compositions. Their manifesto (1934) , written by the artist and illustrated with this painting, Plant and Animal Analogies (1934 – 35) promoted an art that was “an ordered, pleasurable, introspective activity; an arrangement of emotions or ideas. The pictorial elements function only to create this subjective form; either emotional or mood-entity, or intellectual or idea-entity.”
Photographed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC
