#Alyce Mahon

[majestativa]

Mirrored in the dark waters below, Narcissa-like. […] A portrait of a female lover.

— Alyce Mahon, Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism, (2009)

[mariacallous]

The writings of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) present a libertine philosophy of sexual excess and human suffering that refuses to make any concession to law, religion, or public decency. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Alyce Mahon traces how artists of the twentieth century turned to Sade to explore political, sexual, and psychological terror, adapting his imagery of the excessively sexual and terrorized body as a means of liberation from systems of power.

Mahon shows how avant-garde artists, writers, dramatists, and filmmakers drew on Sade’s “philosophy in the bedroom” to challenge oppressive regimes and their restrictive codes and conventions of gender and sexuality. She provides close analyses of early illustrated editions of Sade’s works and looks at drawings, paintings, and photographs by leading surrealists such as André Masson, Leonor Fini, and Man Ray. She explains how Sade’s ideas were reflected in the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire and the fiction of Anne Desclos, who wrote her erotic novel, Story of O, as a love letter to critic Jean Paulhan, an admirer of Sade. Mahon explores how Sade influenced the happenings of Jean-Jacques Lebel, the theater of Peter Brook, the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the multimedia art of Paul Chan. She also discusses responses to Sade by feminist theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, and Angela Carter.

Beautifully illustrated, The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde demonstrates that Sade inspired generations of artists to imagine new utopian visions of living, push the boundaries of the body and the body politic, and portray the unthinkable in their art.

[abwwia]

Accompanying this summer's exhibit at Guggenheim Venice, Surrealism and Magic, the catalogue includes works by Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Kay Sage, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo (and others). Essays by Susan Aberth, Victoria Ferentinou, Alyce Mahon , Grazina Subelyte... and more

Accompanying this summer's exhibit at Guggenheim Venice, Surrealism and Magic, the catalogue includes works by Victor Brauner, Leonora Carrington, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Roberto Matta, Roland Penrose, Kay Sage, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo. Essays by Susan Aberth, Will Atkin, Victoria Ferentinou, Alyce Mahon, Kristoffer Noheden, Gavin Parkinson, Grazina Subelyte, and Daniel Zamani consider the diverse engagements of surrealists with the occult.

[rosabelbelieve]

just finished a zoom call which technically constituted my first art history lecture of this year and i am Emotional

[wearewia]

Dorothea Tanning, Tate Modern

"It’s as gothic as it is surreal, and resolutely modern" @mrrichardnorris on Dorothea Tanning, @Tate Modern for @weareWIA #dorotheatanning #surrealism

Dorothea Tanning, at Tate Modern until 9th June 2019. By Richard Norris. 

The prolific, seven decade long career of Dorothea Tanning, now on display until June at Tate Modern, London, has long been overshadowed by her relationship and marriage to the surrealist Max Ernst. With this exhibition, which collects 100 works of drawing, sketches, painting, sculpture and installation, that legacy is at…

[chez-mimich]

DOTOTHEA TANNING. Londra, 4 maggio 2019. Qualcuno di voi ricorderà una mostra a a Milano che in Italia fece storia: “L’altra metà dell’avanguardia” curata da Lea Vergine; ebbene quando la curatrice inviò a Dorothea Tanning la richiesta di un’opera,per quella mostra che si prefiggeva di trattare l’altra metà del mondo artistico al femminile, Dorothea Rispose: “Carissima, benché apprezzi molto il suo intento, non potrò mandarle alcuna opera poiché non sono così certa di essere una donna, così come non sono poi così certa di essere un uomo...” . Ed è con questo spirito che occorre guardare la favolosa mostra della Tate Modern che raccoglie una produzione straordinaria che va dagli anni del suo incontro col Surrealismo parigino, agli anni del suo significativo soggiorno in Arizona, del quale restano evidenti tracce nelle rappresentazioni della natura, fino alle affascinanti creature di stoffa della fine degli anni Sessanta, anche se Alyce Mahon a Ann Coxon curatrici della mostra hanno preferito, e giustamente, una divisione tematica. Continuo a pensare che la Tanning migliore sia quella lontana dalle inevitabili influenze del marito, Max Ernst ed è per questo che credo che le sezioni “Tango Lives”, “Hotel du Pavot”’e quella conclusiva siano quelle più originali e significative. “La Chambre 202 dell’Hotel Pavot” riesce sempre a crearmi uno stato d’animo di puro divertimento benché sia cupa e angosciante. I “mostri” di pezza di Dorothea sono esseri burloni e benché partoriti dall’inconscio incontrollato dell’artista, una notte in loro compagnia non mi dispiacerebbe affatto. Del resto l’ultima sezione si chiama proprio “Soft bodies and wild desire”, invitante vero?

[hannah-waters]

Dorothea Tanning by Alyce Mahon Continued…

[bookstand]

Marquis de Sade: depraved monster or misunderstood genius? It's complicated

Marquis de Sade: depraved monster or misunderstood genius? It’s complicated

Portrait of the sadist as a young man by Charles Amédée Philippe van Loo (1719-1795). Author provided

Alyce Mahon, University of Cambridge

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was a bestselling author in his day and yet he spent most of his life behind bars. His novels inspired the term “sadist” – “a person who derives pleasure, especially sexual gratification, from…

[majestativa]

Both nightmarish and erotic.

— Alyce Mahon, Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism, on Mimi Parent's reliquary, (2009)

[middleagedwomen-curves]

I have such a stupid crush on Alyce Mahon, an art historian at Cambridge. She's just so eloquent and clever and her voice is just... oh my god. She's so amazing ✨

I will have to check who she is! History teachers are really interesting and stunning

[sunfl0wer-spirit]

I'm applying for masters courses and my FAVE art historian, Alyce Mahon, works on a course that I qualify for!! It may not work out, but it might!!

NO WAY. God I wish I was doing that :’( I’m certain it will! I wish you all the best!

[kimburnsresearchual]

Leonana Carrington - (Samain, 1951)

‘we’re frightened that somebody might think that we are also animals, which we are’ … Leonora Carrington 

As Alyce Mahon notes, Carrington’s work complexes divisions instantiated between ‘the real/surreal, animate/inanimate, masculine/feminine, sun/moon — into what she terms a “comprehensive energy”.’  I always like to have a level of surrealism and symbolism within my work, and Carrington paints in a weird and creative way that immediately draws you in. I think ij most drawn to the dynamic energy of Carrington’s work and how she is able to paint in this way whilst maintaining a darkness to each piece.

[queer-a-dictionary-blog]

thirty-five.

Alyce Mahon has compiled a survey of Eroticism and Art, touching upon significant figures from the Renaissance to the 2000s but focussed on the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

“When incorporated in art,” she argues, “eroticism is not only about sexual desire and pleasure, it is something more. It draws on the Western metaphysical tradition, the battle between the body and the mind; it also speaks to our desire for a communion with others, out passion for life, our fear of mortality. […] For it is the frisson of the narrow divide between erotic desire and erotic excess, between acceptable representations of eroticism and ones that cause outrage, that exposes not just the true nature of eroticism but out human trepidation when the erotic is given representational form.”

The frontispieces for each chapter: Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, The Turkish Bath, 1863; Thomas Eakins, Swimming, 1885; Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait Masturbating (Eros), 1911; Hannah Höch, Tamer, c.1930; Man Ray, Veiled Erotic, 1933; Thomas Hart Benton, City Activities with Subway, from America Today, 1930; Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964; Yolanda López, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe, 1978; Lyle Ashton Harris, in collaboration with Thomas Allen Harris, Brotherhood, Crossroads and Etcetera, #2, 1994; Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tragic Anatomies, 1996.

[surrealistnyc]

Accompanying this summer's exhibit at Guggenheim Venice, Surrealism and Magic, the catalogue includes works by Victor Brauner, Leonora Carrington, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Roberto Matta, Roland Penrose, Kay Sage, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, and Remedios Varo. Essays by Susan Aberth, Will Atkin, Victoria Ferentinou, Alyce Mahon, Kristoffer Noheden, Gavin Parkinson, Grazina Subelyte, and Daniel Zamani consider the diverse engagements of surrealists with the occult.

[majestativa]

The female body and its attendant roles and life stages — from lover to mother to woman on her death bed. The tradition of the still life and of the feminine ideal are overthrown in the process and the maternal becomes menacing, the muse becomes dominatrix, the timeless becomes emphatically modern. Even death announces new life.

— Alyce Mahon, Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism, (2009)

[majestativa]

As her biographer Hayden Herrera writes, Kahlo ‘would probe the […] organs hidden beneath wounded flesh, and the feelings hidden beneath stoic features’.

— Alyce Mahon, Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism, on Frida Kahlo, (2009)