Tag Archives: Surrealist

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Salvador Dali, Retrospective Bust of a Woman

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retrospective bust of a woman by gail worley
All Photos By Gail

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.

retrospective bust of a woman detail by gail worley

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.

retrospective bust of a woman side view photo by gail worley

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

retrospective bust of a woman detail photo by gail
Detail

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Remedios Varo, The Juggler (The Magician)

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Remedios Varo The Juggler By Gail Worley
Photo By Gail

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. She also deployed decalomania, a technique favored by the Surrealists in which materials such as paper or aluminum foil are pressed onto wet paint to transfer a pattern that may be embellished. Its atmospheric effects can be seen in the magician’s garments and in the background trees.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Kurt Seligmann, Magnetic Mountain

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Magnetic Mountain
Photo By Gail

After Kurt Seligmann (1900 – 1962) settled in Paris, his sinister, biomorphic compositions gained the attention of Andre Breton, who invited him to join the Surrealist group in 1937. With the outbreak of World War II, Seligmann became the first Surrealist to arrive in New York, and he was instrumental in the emigration of most of the movement’s leading figures. Transformed by contact with new cultures, Seligmann’s work continued to evolve, and as the Surrealist’s acknowledged expert on magic, he infused his paintings with mythology and esotericism. Indeed, the year he made this work, Magnetic Mountain (1948) he published The Mirror of Magic, a history of the occult. The winding forms and mystical quality of this canvas would influence a new generation of American artists, including his student, Robert Motherswell.

Photographed in the Art Institute Chicago

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Gertrude Abercrombie, Self Portrait As My Sister

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Self Portrait As My Sister
Photo By Gail

Chicago-based surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie (1909 – 1977) was acclaimed for her enigmatic paintings of stark interiors and illusory landscapes. On first glance, Self Portrait As My Sister (1941) appears to be relatively straight-forward representation, lacking the idiosyncratic imagery of her complex, dreamlike works. But Abercrombie was an only child, and the title’s allusion to a sister heightens the paradox of the painting. She frequently used self-portraiture as a means of trying on new guises and personas, later observing, “It’s always myself that I paint, but not actually, because I don’t look that good or cute.” Indeed, in her records she referred to this work as “Portrait of Artist as Ideal.” Her reference to a fictitious and prettier sister hints at desire to be a different person, a longing she could satisfy through her painting.

Photographed in the Art Institute Chicago.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Yves Tanguy, Title Unknown

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Yves Tanguy Title Unknown
Photo By Gail

This unknown-titled work from 1926 shows French Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy’s debt to the still and imaginative landscapes of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico.  The influence is apparent in the perplexing array of imagery that includes a small school of fish and a child flattened by a cart. The plain white tower in the background —  a favorite iconographic motif of de Chirico — secures the connection between the two artists.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.