


images that haunt us








(*) Note: not orchids but irises; vase with irises. Unless they were a variety of orchids that look very much like irises. If anybody happen to have the knowledge to disambiguate, please drop a line below. Thank you!

“Le sujet le plus banal, quelques fleurs dans un vase par exemple, devient nouveau par la façon dont les lumières y sont groupées et par l’extrème variété des valeurs. (…) Pour donner plus de richesse à ses compositions, l’auteur [Laure Albin Guillot] les a tirées sur fond or selon un procédé dont elle a le brevet.”
Jean Gallotti, ‘La photographie est-elle un art? Laure Albin-Guyot [sic!]’, dans L’art vivant, No. 99, 1er février 1929, p. 138. [Quoted from Sotheby’s]


Fini’s owl mask originates with the New Year’s Eve party called the Bal des Oiseaux given at the Palais Rose on the avenue Foch, Paris, by Vicomte Charles Benoist d’Azy at the end of 1948. Webb writes, “she wore an owl mask of white feathers with headdress and gown of black-and-green-striped feathers. A series of dramatic photographs of her in this costume, as well as in the costumes for other balls of 1947 and 1948, were taken by Andre Ostier and widely published in newspapers and magazines, and Pauline Reage used the same mask in the final scene of her erotic novel Histoire d’O (Story of O), which was later illustrated by Leonor.”
Quotation from Peter Webb’s biography: Sphinx – The Life and Art of Leonor Fini
Retrieved from Story of O

![Yayoi Kusama at the age of ten, 1939. [Kusama, ca 10 år gammal år 1939] Bild: © Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/ Singapore; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; David Zwirner, New York, © Yayoi Kusama | src Svenska Yle](https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52240647060_dbedc246c2_o.jpg)


In December of 1924 Bronia and Tylia Perlmutter were invited by Francis Picabia to attend a performance of the Dadaist ballet Relâche, which included a screening of a short film, Entr’acte, at intermission. Bronia was introduced to the film’s director, René Clair, after the show. Later that same month Picabia asked Bronia to participate in a production, Ciné Sketch, that he and Clair were putting on after the ballet on New Year’s Eve. Bronia agreed, and she and Marcel Duchamp appeared nude—Duchamp did have a strategically placed fig leaf—in a living tabloid of Lucas Cranach’s Adam and Eve, which Man Ray photographed.
A bit part in Clair’s film Le Voyage Imaginaire (1926) followed. The two fell in love and were married in 1926. Quoted from tales of a mad cap heiress (Blogspot)

The dancer Valerie Bettis in Desperate Heart, 1944 (printed ca. 1982) by Barbara Morgan. This image of modern dancer and choreographer Valerie Bettis performing her signature work approaches abstraction. Her body is almost completely obscured by the cascading fabric of her skirt. | akron art museum
