Maya Deren - Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

More silent brilliance from Maya Deren


Maya Deren - Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)
Ritual In Transfigured Time (1946) silently follows Rita Christiani's perspective as she enters an apartment to find Maya Deren immersed in the ritual of unwinding wool from a loom. Deren includes another expression of the external invading the internal with a strange wind that surrounds and entrances her as she becomes transported by the ritual. Ritual in Transfigured Time links the looming ritual with the ritual of the social greeting. Christiani enters a party, meets and greets, moving throughout the crowd like a dancer. Her movements become increasingly expressive and fluid, the ritual becomes a performance. Key themes in this film are the dread of rejection and the contrasting freedom of expression in the abandonment to the ritual.

Pierre Roy - Danger on the Stairs

Pierre Roy a relative of the famous French writer Jules Vernes was borned in Nantes in 1880. One of the original surrealists, Roy may be considered an immediate father of magic realism or superrealism. When he was 30 he met fauvist creators and writers Salmon, Appolinaire and Max Jacob. Later he met Paul Eluard, Philippe Soupault, Marcel Duchamp and Picabia and became interested in surrealism. The first group exhibition of surrealist artists was in 1925 at the Galerie Pierre; it included Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Andre Masson, Joan Miro, Man Ray, Picasso and Pierre Roy.
Unusual and "mystère onirique" are the keys to his work which represents, in meticulous detail, recognizable scenes and objects which are taken out of natural context, distorted and combined in fantastic ways as they might be in dreams; its sources are in the art of fauvist painter Henri Rousseau and also De Chirico who was a very good friend of him. Danger on the Stairs, 1927 or 1928 is an overt example of fantastic dissociation, but nonetheless effective for that. Pierre Roy is especially appreciated in the United States where he often exhibited his paintings; several of them were reproduced on the cover of Vogue magazine. Among his admirors were Jean Cocteau and Aragon.

text from www.mcs.csueastbay.edu

Danger on the stairs

Une journée à la campagne

Amusing physique

Maya Deren - Meshes of the Afternoon

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, Deren attacked Hollywood for its artistic, political and economic monopoly over American cinema. She stated, “I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick,” and observed that Hollywood “has been a major obstacle to the definition and development of motion pictures as a creative fine-art form.” She set herself in opposition to the Hollywood film industry’s standards and practices.

Rufino Tamayo - Tres Personajes

Tres Personajes is a painting by Rufino Tamayo that was stolen from the owners lock up as they moved house in 1987 and missing for almost 20 years before being found amongst the trash on the curb by Elizabeth Gibson. She lugged it home and put it on her wall, however, intregued by the painting she began to research it and eventually via antiques roadshow she found out its true worth. The painting was sold at a Sotheby's auction for 1.1 million dollars, of which Gibson recieved a percentage of.

Tres Personajes (1970)


more from the artist...

El Lissitzky - Proun

El Lissitzky developed a suprematist style of his own, a series of abstract, geometric paintings which he called Proun (pronounced "pro-oon"). The exact meaning of "Proun" was never fully revealed, with some suggesting that it is a contraction of proekt unovisa (designed by UNOVIS) or proekt utverzhdenya novogo (Design for the confirmation of the new). Later, El Lissitzky defined them ambiguously as "the station where one changes from painting to architecture."

Proun was essentially El Lissitzky's exploration of the visual language of suprematism with spatial elements, utilizing shifting axes and multiple perspectives; both uncommon ideas in suprematism. Suprematism at the time was conducted almost exclusively in flat, 2D forms and shapes, and El Lissitzky, with a taste for architecture and other 3D concepts, tried to expand suprematism beyond this. His Proun works (known as Prounen) spanned over a half a decade and evolved from straightforward paintings and lithographs into fully three-dimensional installations. They would also lay the foundation for his later experiments in architecture and exhibition design. While the paintings were artistic in their own right, their use as a staging ground for his early architectonic ideas was significant. In these works, the basic elements of architecture — volume, mass, color, space and rhythm — were subjected to a fresh formulation in relation to the new suprematist ideals. Through his Prouns, utopian models for a new and better world were developed. This approach, in which the artist creates art with socially defined purpose, could aptly be summarized with his edict "das zielbewußte Schaffen" — "task oriented creation."

From Wikipedia sort of.

A Story of Two Squares (1920)


Dlia golosa (1923)

Juan Gris

At first Gris painted in the analytic style of Cubism, but after 1913 he began his conversion to synthetic Cubism, of which he became a steadfast interpreter, with extensive use of papier collé. Unlike Picasso and Braque, whose Cubist works were monochromatic, Gris painted with bright harmonious colors in daring, novel combinations in the manner of his friend Matisse.

In 1924, he first designed ballet sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev and the famous Ballets Russes.

Gris articulated most of his aesthetic theories during 1924 and 1925. He delivered his definitive lecture, Des possibilités de la peinture, at the Sorbonne in 1924. Major Gris exhibitions took place at the Galerie Simon in Paris and the Galerie Flechtheim in Berlin in 1923, and at the Galerie Flechtheim in Düsseldorf in 1925.

He died in Boulogne-sur-Seine (Paris) in the spring of 1927 at the age of forty, leaving a wife, Josette, and a son, Georges.

His top auction price is $20.8 million which was set by his 1915 still life titled, Livre, pipe et verres.

from wikipedia

The Sunblind (1914, see at Tate Gallery)

The Painter's Window (1925)

Harlequin with Guitar (1919)

Jacques Villon

Jacques Villon (July 31, 1875 - June 9, 1963) was a French cubist painter and printmaker. Elder brother to Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp and Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, he was born Gaston Emile Duchamp, the reason for his name change was to distinguish himself from his siblings, he adobted Villon as a homage to 15th century medieval french poet François Villon. In 1903 he helped organize the drawing section of the first Salon d'Automne in Paris. In 1904-1905 he studied art at the Académie Julian.

By 1906, Montmartre was a bustling community and Jacques Villon moved to Puteaux in the quiet outskirts of Paris. There, he began to devote more of his time to working in drypoint, an intaglio technique that creates dark, velvety lines that stand out against the white of the paper. During this time he worked closely to develop his technique with other important printmakers such as Manuel Robbe.

His isolation from the vibrant art community in Montmartre, together with his modest nature, ensured that he and his artwork remained obscure for a number of years.

Among Villon's greatest achievements as a printmaker was his creation of a purely graphic language for cubism — an accomplishment that no other printmaker, including his fellow cubists Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque, could claim.

Les Cartes


Le Potin


Portrait of Marcel Duchamp

Comedie de societe

Photograph of Duchamp brothers (l-r Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon in the garden of Jacques Villon's studio in Pateaux, France, 1914)