Jay Defeo, The Rose, 1958-66
For the next eight years, The Rose took over her life, as she painted and repainted it.
“It’s going through a whole cycle of art history, the primitive, the archaic, the classic, and then on to the baroque but still not the final version. I just want to create a work that is just so precariously balanced between going this way or that way that it maintains itself,” she said.
To keep herself going, Jay drank a quart of Christian Brothers brandy a day and smoked two to three packs of Gauloises. At some point, she began adding metallic powders into the mix for sparkle, and inserted copper wire, beads, and pearls. By 1965, she had paid a total of $5,375.51 for painting materials. Today it resides in the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Despite all those Gauloises, it was the painting that was the death of her. Constantly licking her brush to get a point, Jay ingested huge amounts of lead from the white paint, and died of cancer in 1989. Ironically, Jay’s first title for her painting has been Deathrose.
—The Beats: A Graphic History
Breathtaking…
Vogue France/Claude Cahun
Jeff Wall “The Destroyed Room” 1978
Eugene Delacroix “The Death of Sardanopolis” 1827
Jeff Wall’s carefully constructed image interprets Delacroix’s Romantic scene of violence and destruction. Light box image.
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
George Platt Lynes - Salvador Dali, 1939.Gelatin silver print with applied pigment
(via sfmoma)
I love this sculpture. Willhelm Lehmbruck. “Fallen Soldier” WW1. Germany.
Francesca Woodman: Square compositions.
why use yourself as a subject? it’s a matter of convenience, I’m always available.
(Guggenheim, NY)
Why not sneeze, Rose Selavy?
Claude Cahun: Embraced by Surrealists, Cahun’s work comments on gender identification, dreams, and even primitivism. In “Object” (1936) she transforms the experience of the eyeball into the actual gaze and comments against French Nationalism.
In “Self Portrait”, she conceives her own body into a plastic medium. She re-animates the idea of self-hood as a scary household object.
Cahun is the precursor to Cindy Sherman.
In “Self Portrait (2)” she depicts a theatrical, mercurity, of her own body. The switching of identification, portraying oneself as a mask, deviates away from awareness of gender productivity in pre-World War Two, France. Cahun comments on everyone playing a role: the self and the double. Here she depicts ambiguity of gaze, one is daunting, one is exposed, the exposed shows a moment of fragility through the exposed neck. The daunting stares into the viewer. Cahun depicts metamorphosis.
De Stijl: Schroder Haus
