Displaying items by tag: dora maar

"Forbidden Games” is an exhibition of 167 of the 178 photographs David Raymond donated and sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2007. The show, which runs through Jan. 11, 2015, includes works taken from 1920 through the 1940s by such major surrealist and modernist photographers as Man Ray, Bill Brandt, Brassaï and Hans Bellmer, as well as many less well known, such as Dora Maar, Marcel G. Lefrancq and George Hugnet. There are also works by photographers not ordinarily identified with either tendency who nonetheless occasionally took pictures that could be so considered. The images Mr. Raymond assembled make a grand introduction to important aspects of art photography between the end of the First World War and mid-century.

Think of Picasso, and it's impossible not to envision the women he loved, tormented and painted, like Fernande Olivier, whose distorted features are indelibly associated with early cubism, or Dora Maar, often depicted weeping, or Marie-Thérèse Walter, whose face and body the artist sundered so violently during his surrealist years. "For me, there are only two kinds of women—goddesses and doormats," he told his postwar partner, Françoise Gilot, as she recounted in Life with Picasso, her 1964 memoir.

Since Picasso's death in 1973, the works emerging from these liaisons—and the gripping tales behind them—have provided fodder for countless museum and gallery shows.

Auction houses expect to sell as much as $2.3 billion of art in New York this month as billionaires from China to Brazil compete for trophy works by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Jeff Koons in a surging market.

Two weeks of semiannual sales of Impressionist, modern, postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, Sotheby’s (BID) and Phillips begin May 6, with online bidding as early as today. Their combined sales target represents a 77 percent increase from estimates for a similar round of auctions a year ago.