Displaying items by tag: surrealism

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.

Two and a half years ago, the Man Ray Trust hung out a shingle in the Wall Street Journal. ‘Come buy our archive,’ the story all but begged. Evidently, no buyer emerged for the 400 works because Sotheby’s has announced that the collection will be sold in 300 lots in Paris on November 15th. This will be the second largest sale of Man Ray’s works following the previous sale of estate works nearly 20 years ago:

At the core of the sale is a group of over 191 lots of  vintage photographs ranging from portraiture and fashion photography, including solarisation and gauze effects, to Surrealist compositions and iconic Man Ray photographs such as "Magnolia Flower" (1926), Starfish (1928), "Ostrich Egg" (1944) and "Mathematical Object" (1934).

The 7-foot-tall sculpture of two feet at Chicago’s Oak Street Beach has legs.

That is, it’s expected to move to other locations around the city as long as the Art Institute of Chicago is hosting an exhibit inspired by René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist artist. The beach installation is a larger-than-life marketing campaign to bring attention to the Magritte exhibit at the Art Institute.

The feet, each of which is 800 pounds and made of plywood and carved foam with a urethane hard coat, were installed at Oak Street Beach.

A nicely suited man slips a hand into a trouser pocket and tilts his head toward the gramophone. His coat is slung over a nearby chair beside a suitcase. He seems to be savoring a few final bars before taking his leave, an exit that seems unrushed.

Beyond his view, two bowler-hatted men lie in wait, one with a net, the other a club. Just behind him, a woman lies naked, eyes closed and blood raining from her mouth. There it is — the inevitable bit of bloodletting in the otherwise bloodless, tidy paintings of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte.

This is the potency of Magritte's popular, endlessly reproduced and much underestimated works, enigmatic paintings that inspired the green apple on the Beatles' record label, the bottle-filled sea in the title credits for HBO's "Boardwalk Empire" and any number of book covers on psychology, among many other pop culture riffs.

This summer the Frist Center for the Visual Arts presents the critically acclaimed Real/Surreal: Selections from the Whitney Museum of American Art from June 27–October 13, 2014, in the Center’s Upper-Level Galleries. Focusing on art created between the 1920s and 1950s, the exhibition traces the influence of celebrated European Surrealists on American artists ranging from Man Ray and Federico Castellón to Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and many more.

Drawn from the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition features more than 60 paintings, photographs and prints. At the thematic heart of the exhibition is the meeting of realism—fidelity to a subject’s observable nature—and Surrealism—artwork that explores the imagination and subconscious in search of deeper realities. “This exhibition seeks to challenge and break down the traditional art historical categories of realism and Surrealism,” says Frist Center Curator Katie Delmez. “The two approaches, while seemingly opposite, do have points of convergence and their juxtaposition encourages new ways of looking at American art of this period.”

From the Village to Vogue: The Modernist Jewelry of Art Smith features 26 pieces including silver and gold jewelry created by African American artist, Art Smith, as well as select pieces by his contemporaries. Inspired by surrealism, biomorphism, and primitivism, Smith was one of the leading modernist jewelers of the mid-twentieth century. His work is dynamic in both size and form.

A Gouro mask from Côte d’Ivoire, which was once owned by French surrealist writer and poet André Breton, sold for more than a million euros on Wednesday, making a new record for a Gouro mask. The mask, one of the favorites of the famous poet, was sold at Paris’ Drouot for €1,375,000 ($1,865,710), 10 times its presale estimate of €100,000-150,000.

As it approaches its 25th anniversary, the Wexner Center for the Arts is set to feature a variety of works this fall, as well as give visitors a peek into the personal gallery of Les Wexner and his wife, Abigail.

Beginning Sept. 21 and running through Dec. 31, the Wexner Center is set to celebrate its 25th anniversary with “Transfigurations: Modern Masters from the Wexner Family Collection,” displaying works from the art collection of the businessman and Ohio State alumnus.

Pieces to be on view include original masterworks of artists Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet, who are known virtuosos in their respective art movements, including cubism, expressionism, surrealism and modernism.

Bringing together a group of eight paintings and works on paper from the Saint Louis Art Museum and Switzerland's Beyeler Foundation, this exhibition showcases the entire oeuvre of Mark Rothko and celebrates the diversity of nearly 30 years of artistic output from this crucial figure in the American Abstract Expressionist movement.

The exhibition includes early Surrealist imagery by Rothko while Untitled, 1948 is emblematic of the artist's abstractions, known as "multiforms". Painted in a range of blue, yellow, orange and white shapes against a salmon-colored background, this work's importance is heightened since it is the last image that Rothko signed on the front of the canvas. The artist famously affirmed that his paintings should be "tragic and timeless"— an observation that inspired the exhibition title.