Category: Art

Marcel Jean

Posted on Posted in Art, Decorative Arts, SurrealismLeave a comment
Armoire Surrealiste, 1941
Meuble L’Arbre à tiroirs, 1941
Le peintre Marcel Jean réalise en 1941, à Budapest où il a fui pendant la guerre, des meubles, dont l’Arbre à tiroirs ou l’Armoire surréaliste. Ce dernier témoigne de l’influence des surréalistes qu’il a rencontrés en 1933. Proche de ce milieu, Marcel Jean sera un des premiers historiens de ce mouvement et écrira en 1959 une Histoire de la peinture surréaliste. Le monde de l’objet va beaucoup intéresser les surréalistes. Dans sa Tasse en fourrure, Meret Oppenheim détourne l’objet courant de son usage trivial pour en faire le support de rêves ou de fantasmes. Dans son célèbre Visage de Mae West, Dalí transforme le visage en décor de salon. Ici, Marcel Jean prend le prétexte d’une armoire pour en faire un objet insolite et onirique. Chaque porte est ornée de vantaux et tiroirs à ouvertures multiples dans l’embrasure desquels s’ouvre un paysage immobile.  Les Arts Décoratifs
Specter of the Gardenia, 1936

This head of a woman, with zippers for eyes and a filmstrip collar encircling her neck, composes an anxious portrait. At the same time, its tactile surface of black cloth and red velvet is charged with the eroticism of imagined touch. Marcel Jean believed that everyday objects “possess a double meaning: all have a latent sexual content besides their practical role, and our dreams…do not fail to endow them with values we unconsciously gave them when they were created during the waking state.”

Jean originally called this work Secret of the Gardenia, after an old movie reel he discovered, along with the velvet stand, at a Paris flea market. Chance discoveries like these provided a trove of items for Surrealists to combine in making their uncanny work.  MOMA

Fable

Posted on Posted in ArtLeave a comment
El Greco, ca. 1580
… “Fable” (circa 1570-75), done when El Greco enjoyed the favor of Alessandro Cardinal Farnese in Rome, 
shows the young artist’s early interest in dramatic light. 
The painting is based on a literary description of a lost masterpiece by Antiphilus of Alexandria, 
although the reason for El Greco’s addition of a monkey in the scene is disputed.

Born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Candia, Crete, in 1541 and probably trained as an icon painter, 
the man who came to be known as El Greco (The Greek) journeyed to Venice and Rome as a young man 
to study the work of the great Renaissance masters and became a disciple of Titian.
Although critical of the great Michelangelo, the arrogant El Greco imitated the Italian’s muscular,
massive treatment of figures in his early paintings. “Michelangelo did not know how to paint portraits…,” 
the artist once wrote. “And as for imitating colors as they appear to the eye, it cannot be denied that this 
was a fault with him.”… 

The Genius of El Greco 

By J. CARTER BROWN DIRECTOR, NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART 
National Geographic, June 1982