Good afternoon everyone,

Today is a day for art. Absolutely no theme otherwise, just some art I have been jamming on recently. I hope you enjoy it too.

I really enjoyed this article about Dora Maar and the interplay between high and commercial art in her work. This, for example, is a facecream ad:

Les années vous guettent (The Years Lie in Wait for You), ca. 1935, probably used in an advertisement for an anti-aging cream, shows a spider in its web superimposed in white over the beautiful, pensive face of Maar’s close friend Nusch Éluard, wife of the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard. Nusch’s face is placed above the centerline of the frame, and to the left, with the spider set directly between her eyes. The lighting (a specialty of Maar’s) is both soft and highly contrasted.

https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/dora-maar-surrealist-photography-picasso-muse-1202677461/

What a tremendous material wood is for art. I love this Elizabeth Catlett sculpture:

“It might not win prizes and it might not get into museums, but we ought to stop thinking that way, just like we stopped thinking that we had to have straight hair. We ought to stop thinking we have to do the art of other people.”

https://www.mfah.org/blogs/inside-mfah/body-soul-of-a-nation

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian lived to 97, made art with mirrors, and looked extremely cool while doing both of those things:

Here's one work but I strongly encourage you to go down an image search/Pinterest rabbit hole of her oeuvre:

Suzanne Cotter, curator of Infinite Possibility: Mirror Works and Drawings, 1974-2014, which opened at the Serralves Foundation in Porto and then toured to the Guggenheim Museum in New York, said her art ‘conveyed light and joy’, adding that she ‘brought to our pent-up Western eyes a completely new perspective as to the possibilities of abstraction as an aesthetic and narrative form’.

https://www.christies.com/features/Iranian-artist-Monir-Farmanfarmaian-10132-1.aspx

Love,

Alex.