Cat for Piano
by Matta
1951
oil on canvas
“In a bed by the Gulf of Corinth, a woman contemplates by firelight the profile of her sleeping lover.
On the wall, his shadow flickers.
The lover, who lies by her side, will leave. At dawn he will leave to war, to death. And his shadow, his traveling companion, will leave with him and with him will die.
It is still dark. The woman takes a coal out of the embers and draws on the wall the outline of his shadow.
Those lines will not leave.
They will not embrace her, and she knows it. But they will not leave.”
- Eduardo Galeano’s version of Pliny’s Maid of Corinth myth about the origins of painting in Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
Judith at the Banquet of Holofernes
by Rembrandt
1634
This was apparently formerly known as Artemisia Receiving Mausolus’ Ashes or just Artemisia AND as Sophonisba Receiving the Poisoned Cup. You can read/watch a little explanation of the name change here. The description of the painting on the Prado’s website is also pretty magnificent.
The Birth of the Milky Way
by Peter Paul Rubens
Ca. 1637
and
The Origin of the Milky Way
by Jacopo Tintoretto
about 1575
Hera was tricked into nursing Hercules (maybe she was sleeping) and when she woke up she pushed him away and her goddess-breastmilk created the Milky Way. Or maybe he just “nursed too vigorously” because he was Hercules.
So is this where the word galactic comes from, too? Lactic? Galactating. Moms, don’t get tricked while you’re galactating unless you want to be in charge of a whole tiny galaxy.
According to google translation:
“Painters at work. The American dancer Miss Gilmore, who has great success in New York, wanted to be portrayed by the English painter Mc Cutcheon. But since the ordinary way to get to paint what they cut was posed on the roof of the Theatre on Broadway where it occurs, United States of America 1925. Photo: A breakneck pose for a portrait.”
Remedios Varo Uranga (December 16, 1908 – October 8, 1963) was a Spanish-Mexican, para-surrealist painter and anarchist. She was born María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga in Anglès, a small town in the province of Girona, Spain in 1908. In 1924 she studied at the Academia de San Fernando de Madrid. During the Spanish Civil War she fled to Paris where she was greatly influenced by the surrealist movement. She met her second husband (the first was the painter Gerardo Lizarraga, whom, as was discovered after her death, she never divorced), the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret in Barcelona. There she was a member of the art group Logicophobiste. They were introduced through a mutual friendship with the Surrealist artist Oscar Dominguez.
Due to her Republican ties, her 1937 move to Paris with Péret ensured that she would never be able to return to Franco’s Spain. She was forced into exile from Paris during the Nazi occupation of France and moved to Mexico City at the end of 1941. She initially considered Mexico a temporary haven, but would remain in Latin America for the rest of her life.
The allegorical nature of much of Varo’s work especially recalls the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, and some critics, such as Dean Swinford, have described her art as “postmodern allegory,” much in the tradition of Irrealism.
