Frida Kahlo · Alvarez Bravo
Category: 1930s
Alvarez Bravo · El eclipse · Sheets
In El eclipse (1933), Álvarez Bravo achieved a dynamic geometry of crisscrossing diagonals. Standing on a shallow corner of a rooftop, a woman is partially concealed by sheets bleaching in the sun and by her dark rebozo, which she presumably holds in front of her face to look at an eclipse. His carefully composed images reveal his modern sense of aesthetics. | text Blanton Museum of Art Collections
mulating the pose of a Flamenco dancer, this woman dramatically turns her head sideways and upwards, while extending one arm high up in the air. Holding a black, sheer cloth over her face and shielding her eyes from the strong Mexican sun, she enacts Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s conception of an eclipse.
At the same time, light bounces off the hanging white sheets, saturating the off-center areas of the photograph.
Alvarez Bravo made many images of linens and clotheslines, exploring the interplay between draped fabric and angular architecture. Here, the addition of a figure, seemingly engaged in a performance, adds mystery and animation to an otherwise formal study. | text: Getty museum
Morning Notebook · 1939
Alvarez Bravo hired a young female model to pose for him while he was teaching photography at the Academia de San Carlos (Academy of San Carlos) in Mexico City in 1937. Over the course of the next few years he created a series of figure studies that are noteworthy for their simple yet powerful compositions. In this picture Alvarez Bravo positioned the young woman on a fabric covered table against a plain white wall. He achieved a balance between divergent elements–stasis and dynamism, tension and relaxation, and positive and negative space.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo directed this model to pose with her head dramatically turned upward. The young woman’s unnatural posture encouraged the presumably male viewer to gaze freely at her eroticized form; her averted face denied her the opportunity to return and confirm the gaze. This pose belongs to an academic tradition of representing women as objects of desire.
Alvarez Bravo produced a series of nude photographs depicting this model. He called the series Morning Notebook, suggesting that the female body was a construction that could be documented and then read like words on a page. During this period, many Surrealist artists, whose work influenced Alvarez Bravo, used the female form in much the same way–for clearly visible consumption. (text quoted from Getty Museum)
(*) Secondary inscription on verso: “Cuaderno de la Mañana (Dicha Puerta)” and “# 8”
Lolly Spender · nudes · 1937-38
Miller au collier par Man Ray
Lee Miller asleep by Man Ray
Surrealism and ecstasy (1933)
The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, is a photomontage built in a spiral: it is made up of 32 photos organized in a labyrinth of photos which wind up, drawing the eye in a hypnotic way towards the central photo, a portrait of a woman by Brassaï. This photo was part of a series of «femmes en jouissance onirique» (women in dreamlike enjoyment), taken in 1932.
Dalí saw in the convolutions of Art Nouveau a form of madness or intoxication. Brassaï’s portrait of the “overthrown” woman fit perfectly with his point. It therefore logically lands at the heart of a system which functions like a puzzle.
The historian Michel Poivert in his analysis of «Le phénomène de l’extase» ou le portrait du surréalisme même (1997) first lists the elements that make up the image: “most of them show a woman’s face that the title invites us to consider in ecstasy. In addition to these female faces, there are three male heads, four sculptures, two objects (a chair, a pin) as well as sixteen ears. These ear photos were taken by Alphonse Bertillon who was a criminologist. More precisely, he was the creator of judicial anthropometry: in 1882 he founded the first criminal identification laboratory in France.
Michel Poivert explains: “The iconography of criminal anthropology makes an incursion here at the very moment when the group seeks to define a revolutionary identity.” The surrealists were very interested in the grammar of repression. Dalí, in particular, was passionate about the journal La Nature, a popular science journal which published at least three articles by Bertillon, illustrated with forensic photographs. The photographic fragments used by Dalí are in fact extracted from synoptic tables or tabbed directories by Bertillon. Bertillon’s ambition was to draw up an atlas of human morphology. What modern police was developing is therefore the transformation of the human body into a territory of surveillance and control. Bertillon reduces the body to a set of records.
Michel Poivert underlines that the repetition of the motif of the ear acts in the manner of a «stéréotypie», that is to say of a gesture reproduced in a loop or of a word reiterated without end: the symptom of a mental disorder. What’s closer to ecstasy than a morbid or hysterical fixation? From this point of view, certainly, the judicial photos of ears have their place perfectly in this photomontage, “which precisely mixes devotion and the disciplinary in the pathological figure of ecstasy,” suggests Michel Poivert: Dali’s passion for hysteria inevitably guides us towards Jean-Martin Charcot. Indeed, at the time when Dalí was concerned about a representation of ecstasy, the definition of the phenomenon by theologians was entirely constructed in reaction against the popularization of hysterical ecstasy.
In the text entitled “The Phenomenon of Ecstasy” (published in Le Minotaure, 1933), Dalí himself explains in covert terms the reason for this choice: the ears are “always in ecstasy” he says, probably in allusion to their coiled shape. The ears are shaped like a fractal or vortex. They lead the eye through a whirlwind to their central point, the black orifice of the ear canal… But the photomontage is itself constructed in the manner of an ear, guiding the eye to the portrait of the woman in ecstasy.
The Phenomenon of Ecstasy shows a woman at the heart of the photomontage; she offers the ambiguous spectacle of a being carried away by an emotion of mixed suffering and joy; between the devotional universe of grace and the clinical one of madness. What passion is she devoted to? Terrestrial or celestial?
Dalé expressed it in these terms: “During ecstasy, at the approach of desire, pleasure, anxiety, all opinions, all judgments (moral, aesthetic, etc.) change dramatically. Every image, likewise, changes sensationally. One would believe that through ecstasy we have access to a world as far from reality as that of dreams. The repugnant can be transformed into desirable, affection into cruelty, the ugly into beauty, defects into qualities, qualities into black misery. (The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, 1933).
sources of the text: Libération & open edition journals
Dalí · Dream of Venus · 1939
In June 1939 Salvador Dalí designed a pavilion for the New York World’s Fair built by the architect Ian Woodner. The building was named Dream of Venus.
The pavilion featured a spectacular facade full of protuberances, vaguely reminiscent of the Pedrera building by Antoni Gaudí. The main door was flanked by two pillars representing two female legs wearing stockings and high-heeled shoes. Through the openings of the irregular façade, visitors could see reproductions of the Saint John the Baptist by Leonardo da Vinci and The Birth of Venus by Botticelli. The outer part of the building also had crutches, cacti, hedgehogs, etc. Inside, the pavilion offered visitors an aquatic dance show in two large swimming pools, with sirens and other items also designed by Dalí, some of them taking their inspiration from the work of Bracelli. Between the painter’s initial ideas and the final result of the project there arose major modifications, which led Dalí to complain about the Fair’s requirements in a pamphlet entitled Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to His Own Madness. […] [quoted from dali.org]
Salvador Dalí wrote this declaration after his experience creating a pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s fair. The ‘Dream of Venus’ pavilion was a Surrealist undersea grotto where semi naked women performed in tanks playing piano and milking cows amongst other suitably surreal activities. The image on this pamphlet of Botticelli’s Venus with the head of a fish was Dalí’s original idea for the Pavilion’s entrance. However, the design was rejected by the Fair’s organizers who stated “‘A woman with the head of a fish is impossible” and replaced it with a simple reproduction of Venus. Believing that his artistic vision had been unacceptably compromised, Dalí responded by producing this pamphlet berating the Fair’s organizers and rallying against mediocrity in art by consensus. [quoted from V&A museum]
[…] Despite the conflicts that derived from Dalí’s collaboration with the organizers of the Fair, his participation has to be rated as a highly important moment within the painter’s increasing approximation to mass culture, and his need to project his ideas beyond the strict circles of artistic culture. In this sense it may not be exaggerated to state that The Dream of Venus was a first version (though with features and a context of its own) of that other enormous “inhabitable” and “visitable” artistic object that was to be the Dalí Theatre-Museum of Figueres many years later. [quoted from dali.org]
Hettner by Wols circa 1935
Nora Holt by James Connelly
un regard oblique 