#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…

[artbookdap]

We ❤️ Linder! 'Linder Sterling: Linderism,' a career retrospective on the punk collagist who has defied the confines of career, is NEW from @buchhandlungwaltherfranzkoenig⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Published to accompany the exhibition @kettlesyard - opening August 14, on view til October 11.⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ The art of Linder (born 1954) made its public debut not in galleries but in punk fanzines and as art for the sleeve of the Buzzcocks' first single, "Orgasm Addict." Accompanying the first in-depth survey of Linder’s work in the UK, 'Linderism' reproduces works from across her career, from her punk collages to her recent work, and offers four new perspectives on her wide-ranging practice by James Boaden, Alyce Mahon, Amy Tobin and Sarah Victoria Turner.⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ The essays address Linder’s early photomontages forged in the crucible of punk and postpunk culture in the North-West of England, as well as more recent shifts in her practice encompassing spirituality, the occult and the surreal. Linderism includes extensive documentation of working drawings and research images—the materials that have long formed the basis of her practice—as well as documentation of works included in the survey exhibition.⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Text by James Boaden, Alyce Mahon, Amy Tobin, Sarah Victoria Turner.⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Please order from your local independent #bookstorehero — many are reopening or offering curbside pickup! Or order via linkinbio.⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ #linder #linderism #lindersterling @lindersterling #collage #punk⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ https://www.instagram.com/p/CDuB9R8pdbv/?igshid=1s0kif49oivqa

[majestativa]

Both nightmarish and erotic.

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

[caveartfair]

Why Dorothea Tanning’s Powerful Surrealist Art Defied Convention

Dorothea Tanning, Birthday, 1942. © DACS, 2018. Courtesy of Tate Modern.

Dorothea Tanning, Children's Games, 1942. © DACS, 2018. Courtesy of Tate Modern.

In Dorothea Tanning’s mesmerizing self-portrait Birthday (1942), the artist portrays herself in a fantastical, bare-breasted costume anchored by a long, 17th-century-style jacket that features cascading Lilliputian figures whose limbs morph into branches as they drape around her body. Her hand rests on the knob of a door that opens to reveal a never-ending series of other doors. Although her gaze calmly meets that of the viewer, her expression remains resolutely unreadable. For Tanning, who would later describe her process as creating a kind of web of dreams and ideas from which there was no escape, enigma was “a very healthy thing, because it encourages the viewer to look beyond the obvious and commonplace.”

The painting was famously still on its easel when Max Ernst visited Tanning’s studio. Ernst was advising his wife, Peggy Guggenheim, on whom might be included in a major exhibition of female artists she was planning. Birthday, whose title was suggested by Ernst to signify Tanning’s rebirth from the real to the surreal, and Children’s Games (1942), whose mischievous femmes-enfants would become a recurring motif, were included in Guggenheim’s landmark “Exhibition by 31 Women.” The gallerist later quipped that she should have only had 30 women in the show; within months of its opening, Tanning and Ernst began an extramarital affair. They remained together until the latter’s death in 1976.

Dorothea Tanning, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1943. © DACS, 2018. Courtesy of Tate Modern.

Ernst’s career has long overshadowed Tanning’s, but a major retrospective at Tate Modern in London seeks to rectify that disparity, revealing Tanning to be a stunningly innovative and eclectic creator. In a career spanning seven decades, she embraced not only the Surrealist painting for which she is best known, but also poetry, a series of groundbreaking soft sculptures, and costume and set design for the ballet. Although she bristled at the term “woman artist,” there is little doubt that Tanning challenged conventional ideas about sexuality and domesticity within a movement that has frequently been seen by critics as promoting a passive role for women.

Tanning first encountered the Surrealists at the 1936 exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Here, she “not only witnessed Surrealism, but specifically a lot of women artists,” said Alyce Mahon, co-curator of the Tate exhibition. Items on display included Meret Oppenheim’s 1936 Object(also called Breakfast in Fur), which, as Mahon said, is “a very erotic domestic object.” This and other works revealed to Tanning the “limitless expanse of POSSIBILITY,” she later wrote, while the artworks were “signposts so imperious, so laden, so seductive, and, yes, so perverse.”

Dorothea Tanning, Family Portrait, 1954. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais /image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI . © DACS, 2018. Courtesy of Tate Modern.

Dorothea Tanning, The Magic Flower Game, 1941. © DACS, 2018. Courtesy of Tate Modern.

Although Mahon believes that criticism of the male Surrealists has been overstated, pointing out that both male and female Surrealists showed “the female body as beautiful objects to be desired,” Tanning certainly “marshaled Surrealism and the sexual element in her own way,” she said. Her self-portrait is a case in point. “As a woman artist, she chose to represent herself semi-naked, staring out and confronting the spectator,” Mahon explained. Tanning was “mastering her own image…embracing how it might play with sexuality.”

Tanning also took the Surrealist obsession with the femme-enfant—a kind of child-woman whose sense of wonder encouraged probing deeper into the unconscious self—and used it to portray uninhibited young girls yet to be constrained by society’s restrictions and moral codes. In the 1943 painting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (“A Little Night Music”), we see a pair of them confined to an eerie corridor. One girl, her hair upraised as if possessed by a demonic spirit, stares down a large sunflower, a plant Tanning considered the “most aggressive of flowers.”

A more poignant take on the motif can be found in The Guest Room (1950–52), a portrayal of a naked girl, clearly somewhat self-conscious and contemplative, positioned in a doorway. The scene suggests a gateway between adolescence and adulthood, and implicitly questions why society teaches teenage girls to “increasingly be more and more fearful of their own bodies,” Mahon said.

Dorothea Tanning, Endgame, 1944. © DACS, 2018. Courtesy of Tate Modern.

Elsewhere, Tanning wreaks havoc on conventional notions of domesticity. Objects swoop and swirl around her depictions of interiors. In Family Portrait (1954), however, a grotesquely oversized father figure looms over a dining table—a critique of traditional family values.

Endgame (1944) also reveals her frustration with conventional bourgeois morality. Tanning co-opts the Surrealists’ favorite game of chess to portray herself as the queen in the form of a satin shoe literally crushing the bishop. At the bottom of the canvas is a trompe l’oeil scene of Arizona; she and Ernst spent their summers there, unable to respectably cohabit in cosmopolitan art centers until Ernst’s divorce was finalized.

In the 1940s and ’50s, Tanning began designing costumes and sets for Balanchine. These projects saw her vivid imagination come fluidly to life, and may well have had an impact on her painting from that era onwards. She developed a looser style with kaleidoscopic color effects she termed “prismatic.” Verging on the abstract, in these paintings figures merge into one another, while certain body parts appear to morph into the canvas itself.

Dorothea Tanning, Costume for Night Shadow: A Guest, 1945. © DACS, 2018. Courtesy of Tate Modern.

Dorothea Tanning, The Girl, Costume Design for The Witch, a ballet by John Cranko, 1950. © DACS, 2018. Courtesy of Tate Modern.

However, in the 1960s, Tanning grew weary of turpentine and canvas, and turned to fabric and thread to further explore female sexuality. Her experiments grew in size and ambition, culminating in the astonishing installation Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (1970–73), which she referred to as “the surrealist work par excellence—and probably the last?”

Cloth figures leap out of—or are perhaps sucked into—a dreary hotel room. Inside the room, there are further installations—an armchair and a female form merge into an embrace, while another figure reclines over a table in what may be pleasure or pain. Tanning said the individual parts of the work are “stand-ins for our human dilemma…[having] traded their eroticism for despair.”

Dorothea Tanning, Hôtel du Pavot, Chambre 202, 1970–73. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Philippe Migeat. © DACS, 2018. Courtesy of Tate Modern.

The influence of Chambre 202 can be seen in Francesca Woodman’s “House” and “Space²” series (1975–76), photographs in which the artist’s nude body merges with the shredded wallpaper behind her. Mahon believes Tanning also “paved the way for later, more explicitly feminist artists turning to craft and soft sculpture,” such as Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas. The latter’s series “Nud Cycladic”(2010) is particularly reminiscent of Tanning’s work.

Francesca Woodman, From Space2, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Francesca Woodman Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

NUD CYCLADIC 7, 2010. Sarah Lucas Legion of Honor

My Heart Is With You Always (Pink and Blue), 2014. Tracey Emin Lougher Contemporary Auction

Tanning eventually returned to painting and created astonishing work well into her eighties. In one of the last paintings in the Tate show, On Avalon (1987), monumental nude figures dance and sway, reveling in their physicality as they wave huge flower blossoms like pom-poms above their heads. Tanning’s commitment to a narrative of feminine power and resistance throughout her career makes her work powerfully relevant in these troubling early decades of the 21st century.

from Artsy News

[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.