Photo By Gail
In 1935, Salvador Dalí transformed one of the most ordinary objects of then modern life — the rotary telephone dial — into a glamorous work of Surrealist design. Created in collaboration with fashion innovator Elsa Schiaparelli, Dalí’s Telephone Dial Powder Compact reimagined a functional makeup case as a miniature piece of practical art.
Continue reading Ring, Ring: Salvador Dalí’s Telephone Dial Makeup Compact
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Elsa Schiaparelli’s designs were characterized by their witty, Surrealist-inspired details. This black, wool marocain jacket features an embroidered mosaic of mirrored paillettes in the shape of two lamb chops. It dates from Schiaparelli’s Circus collection, presented in February 1938, just after the opening of the influential international Surrealism Exhibition in Paris. The jacket belonged to the American model and actress, Ruth Ford.
Photographed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
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The idea for this work began when Salvador Dalí discovered an inkwell illustrated with the praying couple (from Jean-Francois Millet’s painting The Angelus, 1857–59). He embedded the inkwell in a loaf of bread and placed them both on the portrait bust of a woman.
In 1931, Dalí described Surrealist sculpture as “created wholly for the purpose of materializing in a fetishistic way, with maximum tangible reality, ideas and fantasies of a delirious character.” Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933) not only presents a woman as an object, but explicitly as one to be consumed. A baguette crowns her head, cobs of corn dangle around her neck, and ants swarm along her forehead as if gathering crumbs. Ants, of course, are a common reoccurring motif in Dali’s work.
Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.
Detail
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In Remedios Varo’s The Juggler (The Magician) 1956, the titular juggler (or magician) stands on a platform of a carnivalesque cart filled with fantastical objects and animals. He performs before seemingly identical figures robed in a single gray cloak. To produce this composition, Varo worked in the manner of early Renaissance masters; she transposed preparatory drawings onto a a gesso-primed panel which had been scratched to give it texture.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Remedios Varo, The Juggler (The Magician)
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By the early 1940s, the largely self-taught, Armenian-born Arshile Gorky had formed close friendships with several members of the Surrealist group in New York, including Roberto Matta, who encouraged him to develop his own personal abstract language through experimentation with automatism and biomorphic forms.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Arshile Gorky, The Plough and The Song