#sir roland penrose

[mote-historie]

1946 Artwork by Sir Roland Penrose, Abstract Composition (Portrait of Lee Miller), Made of oil on panel.

[explicus]

Lee Miller first entered the world of photography in New York as a model to the great photographers of the day such as Edward Steichen, Hoynngen-Huene, and Arnold Genthe.

In 1929, Miller went to Paris and worked with the well known Surrealist artist and photographer Man RAY, and succeeded in establishing her own studio. She became known as a portraitist and fashion photographer, but her most enduring body of work is that of her Surrealist images.

In 1932, Miller returned to New York, and again set up her own studio which ran for two years and was highly successful. It closed when she married a wealthy Egyptian businessman Aziz Elou Bey  and went to live with him in Cairo, Egypt. She became fascinated by long range desert travel and photographed desert villages and ruins.

In 1937, during a visit to Paris, she met Roland Penrose, the Surrealist artist who was to become her second husband, and travelled with him to Greece and Romania.

In 1939, she left Egypt for London shortly before World War II broke out. She moved in with Roland Penrose, and defying orders from the US Embassy to return to America, she took a job as a freelance photographer at Vogue.

In 1944, Miller became a correspondent accredited to the US Army, and teamed up with TIME LIFE photographer David E. Scherman. She followed the US troops overseas on D Day + 20.

Lee Miller was probably the only woman combat photo-journalist to cover the front line war in Europe and among her many exploits she witnessed the siege of St. Malo, the Liberation of Paris, the fighting in Luxembourg and Alsace, the Russian/American link up at Torgau, the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau.

She billeted in both Hitler and Eva Brauns houses in Munich, and photographed Hitlers house Wachenfeld at Berchtesgaden in flames on the eve of Germanys surrender. Penetrating deep into Eastern Europe, she covered harrowing scenes of children dying in Vienna, peasant life in post war Hungary and finally the execution of Prime Minister Lazlo Bardossy.

After the war, Miller continued to contribute to Vogue for more years, covering fashion and celebrities. In 1947, she married Sir Roland Penrose and contributed to his biographies of Picasso, Miro, Man Ray and Tapies. Some of her portraits of famous artists like Picasso are the most powerful portraits of the individuals ever produced, but it is mainly for the witty Surrealist images which permeate all her work that she is best remembered.

Antony Penrose, born on September 9th, 1947, is Lee Miller's son with Roland Penrose.

Lee Miller died at Farleys House in 1977.

War photographer Lee Miller standing with soldiers during the liberation of Rennes, France, in 1944.

Photograph: David E Scherman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

[psikonauti]

Roland Penrose (1900–1984) House the Light-house 1983

[magictransistor]

Sir Roland Penrose. Portrait. 1939.

[lostfunzones]

Sir Roland Penrose

Le Grand Jour

1938

[already-14]

Sir Roland Penrose

The visitors, 1931

charcoal, pencil and frottage on paper

33 x 49 cm.

[0nthebalcony]

Patrick Heron 1920 - 1999

Herbert Read

1950

Oil on canvas

H 76.2 x W 63.5 cm

Sir Herbert Read (1893 - 1968) was an English poet, writer and critic. From 1933 - 39 he edited the Burlington Magazine and a was close friend of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and was closely associated with Paul Nash’s Unit One group and the Surrealist movement. In 1947, along with Roland Penrose, he jointly founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). Read was a prominent advocate of British Modernism and an influential art critic from the early 1930s onwards. His works include The Meaning of Art (1931), and Surrealism (1936).

[ehoradote]

Penrose, Sir Roland (1900-1984): Nusch Eluard and Lee Miller

[thebarbarismofpureculture]

London 1965 The World Psychedelic Centre

From the new book, Acid Outlaws: LSD, Counter-Culture and Counter-Revolution by David Black - just published as BPC E-Book September 2019. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Acid- Outlaws-LSD-Counter-Culture- Counter-Revolution-ebook/dp/ B07WZHJKL9/ref

London 1965 –

“Michael Hollingshead, with help from old-Etonians, Desmond O'Brien and Joey Mellen, turned a Belgravia flat into the ‘World Psychedelic Centre’. For their LSD sessions, they imported copies of the new Leary/Alpert/Metzner book, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead to use as a guide. Hollingshead thought ‘that London would indeed become the centre for a world psychedelic movement.’ The World Psychedelic Centre soon drew in a colourful cast of devotees: Playboy boss, Victor Lownes; painter, Felix Topolski; film director, Roman Polanski; Tate Gallery director, Sir Roland Penrose; writers such as William Burroughs and Alex Trocchi; pop stars including Donovan and Paul McCartney; and hundreds more of the jet-set intelligentsia. According to Hollingshead, the World Psychedelic Centre clientèle

‘represented perhaps the seminal non-conformism of England’s mid-sixties intelligentsia - not the evangelical non-conformism of such as the Millbrook sect, but an intellectualized form of psychedelic enlightenment, of which popularised Learyism was largely a culmination - that freed so many of England’s educated people from the rigidity of social and class and cultural patterns which had outwardly been solidifying into right-wing Toryism. Their rebellion was typical of this period; the Establishment was the enemy…’ ”

[micaramel]

Artist: Antoni Tàpies

Venue: Almine Rech, Brussels

Exhibition Title: Antoni Tàpies

Date: February 8, 2020 –

Click here to view slideshow

  Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of the Estate of the Artist and Almine Rech © SABAM Belgium. Photos by Hugard & Vanoverschelde photography. 

Press Release:

Almine Rech-Brussels is pleased to present Antoni Tàpies, a museum-quality selection of 22 paintings, created by Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012) during his last two decades. Indeed, over half of the works on view have been featured in museum and gallery exhibitions, and most are documented in related publications. This is his first solo exhibition in Belgium since 1985, when the Musée d’Art Moderne, Bruxelles (now Musée Modern Museum) organized a survey. This exhibition marks the co-representation of the Estate of Antoni Tàpies.

In 1955, Tàpies started working in a 15th Century farmhouse in the Montseny Mountains, 50km north of Barcelona. This building’s thick, deteriorating walls likely inspired him to rough up his canvases, treating them more like walls to be graffitied, stained, scarred, nicked, and patched. He presented his first “wall paintings” at the 1956 Biennale di Venezia. From then on, many of his paintings resembled walls. After all, Tapia is Spanish for wall. Because of his thick impasto paintings that sometimes feature amorphous blobs, most historians tie his oeuvre to Tachisme, or Art Informel. Others find his linguistic system’s inscrutability indicative of surrealist l’écriture automatique. Just as Willem de Kooning’s “late” paintings from the 1980s shined a light onto his oeuvre, Tàpies’ “late” paintings provide new insights, as this exhibition makes patently clear. In contrast to earlier impastoed surfaces that bar access, his “late” paintings exhibit a decidedly lighter touch, indicative of his artistic and spiritual struggle to wriggle free from matter.

Artist and author Sir Roland Penrose concluded that the “ultimate purpose [of Tàpies’] art is transcendental,” that is to “shock [the viewer] in order to rescue him from the madness of inauthenticity and to lead him into self-discovery.” Although Penrose never explained his use of “transcendental,” Tàpies’ late paintings appeal to values espoused by mid-19th Century New England transcendentalists, who advocated personal freedom and the role of subjective intuition to counter objective empiricism and skepticism. Like the earlier transcendentalists, Tàpies studied Eastern religions, was not a dualist, revered nature, and appreciated science. Consider paintings like Sadharma-Pundarika, whose title references the most famous Mahāyāna sutrā (Buddhist scriptures relayed by monks) and Dharmakaya (both on view here), which the Dalai Lama defines as the space of emptiness, where matter dissolves.

Although no books by Thoreau or Emerson are listed in Tapies’ library catalogue, there are enough parallels to call him a “contemporary transcendentalist,” who felt (like them) that much of reality remains hidden, inaccessible to human beings. And what better way to depict transcendence than to display ineffable symbols or to adhere odd objects, thus capturing the mystery of everyday castaways, such as Collage de la fusta, Claus i corda, Cistella i 3, and Portes cobertes. French art critic Michel Tapié observed, “[this] practice gives tension to the dialogue, always of the highest quality because of the very acceptance of the secret as a secret, a generator of the most effective structures of desire.”

Tàpies’ painting Esgrafiat (Catalan for “sgraffito”) suggests that he eventually grew tired of covering everything up, and started revealing and unsealing, rather than merely concealing. In addition to his marking its surface with recurrent symbols like the “T” and black Greek cross, he added three eyes with which to see more clearly and raked the sand to reveal a barely legible peace sign hovering beneath. The profile in Paisatge i tassa features what look like eyes or thought bubbles, one of which reflects an overflowing cup, a sentiment mirrored by the empty tin-can eyes in Sédas, which is Catalan for “thirst.” Suddenly, the envelopes in Díptic dels sobres [SM1] open up, while one imagines Matèria ocre amb X to be an oversized square envelope, sealed by several signatories. Unlike his earlier impastoed surfaces, these paintings typically display what lies beneath, and several even appear lyrical. Even El Meu índex, this exhibition’s most vividly material painting reveals more than it conceals.

This exceptional exhibition thus offers viewers the opportunity to explore firsthand Tàpies’ unconventional use of sgraffito, a technique traditionally associated with plaster walls and ceramics, whereby plaster or slip is scratched, leaving tracks of the color of the dried under-layer. Although his approach to sgraffito is unusual in an art context, it is familiar to everyday activities such as scribbling on the beach, finger painting, incising soft materials, smearing ink or smudging chalk, letting translucent fluids bleed, puncturing surfaces, or veiling with transparent fabrics. In fact, no fewer than five paintings here exhibit sand/mud scribbles, three are awash in varnish splashes, two feature scratched clay, while Ou Blanc hosts a massive plaster egg incised with impenetrable imagery. Every painting exhibits smears, streaks, and/or drips that set its tempo, a pause (much like a film still) in an otherwise ongoing, dynamic process.

Given this exhibition’s emphasis on lyrical marks, what Tàpies termed “meta-poetry,” this particular grouping could be said to interrogate his array of symbols and preference for gestural strokes. I imagine some viewers being tempted to decode these paintings (his letters, numbers, and symbols resemble Rebus puzzles), yet it is actually far more rewarding to consider each one a mental springboard or ambiguous touchstone meant to trigger ideas or aid free association. Tapié remarked, “[A]s communication it is unfathomable, secretive. It is not an enigma to be unraveled, for that would mean that once solved its content would be exhausted. It is a secret, existing as an end in itself, whose key is never revealed, maintaining with marvelous clarity a dynamic state of fecund freedom.”

That said, it’s worthwhile pointing out several recurring motifs visible here. M i grafismes features a giant letter M, which signified the will for 13 Century Catalan mathematician/mystic Ramon Llull, who devised ars combinatorio, a system for divining truth. The M reappears as a mouth (Boca I punt vermell, Paisatge i tassa and Mirall de vernís) or as mountains (Sadharma-Pundarika and Paisatge i tassa). Transcribing the texts of the four paintings whose letters are written backwards (potentially visible in a mirror) and/or inscribed in sand or clay proves a Sisyphean task. With its twelve pieces of hand-ripped tape concealing varnish blobs, Colors Sublims recalls either redacted texts or what Jacques Derrida termed sous rature, whereby words are crossed out to indicate language’s inevitable inadequacy.

Tàpies rather envisioned his art facilitating “self-knowledge” by inspiring spectators to meditate upon his paintings, which he considered magical objects, “a kind of talisman with the power to heal by touch.” Of course, he didn’t literally imagine spectators touching his paintings the way they might fondle a relic, rosary, or cross. However, he purposely fused sight and touch, enabling spectators to easily imagine what it must be like to touch his paintings’ surfaces. And this exhibition offers a wide range of surfaces to imagine touching from gritty, sandy surfaces to cold metallic surfaces, 3-D forms, stitched appliqués, flowing curtains, textured canvas, fabric swatches, varnish spills, greasy finger paints, scratched surfaces, crackled varnish, peeling paint, incised surfaces, woven canvases, protruding envelopes, clay surfaces, and plaster shapes.

Over five decades, Tàpies participated in nine Biennale di Venezia exhibitions (2005, 1993, 1982, 1978, 1977, 1958, 1956, 1954, 1952); winning the Unesco Prize and David Bright Award in 1958 and the Golden Lion for Painting in 1993, no doubt an unbeatable record. In 1998, Tàpies permanently installed his winning installation Rinzen (1992-1993), whose title means “sudden awakening” in Japanese, at MACBA. Not surprisingly, another notion of “transcendental” is “sudden illumination of the soul,” or rinzen. Llit, on view here, likely refers to that installation, which features a massive bed, magically suspended in space. His art has been the subject of nearly 100 museum surveys in scores of countries on five continents.

Sue Spaid, Ph.D.

  Link: Antoni Tàpies at Almine Rech

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/3cmEGPq

[commercialremodelingcontractor]

Karen Walker visits the home of artists Lee Miller and Sir Roland Penrose

Karen Walker makes a pilgrimage to Farleys House, the home of surrealist artists Lee Miller and her husband, artist Sir Roland Penrose Karen Walker visits the home of artists Lee Miller and Sir Roland Penrose It was with skin-tingling excitement that I boarded a train from London to Lewes in East Sussex to visit Farleys […]

The post Karen Walker visits the home of artists Lee Miller and Sir Roland Penrose appeared first on .

[magictransistor]

Sir Roland Penrose. Magnetic Moths. 1938.

[lostfunzones]

Sir Roland Penrose

House the Light-house

1983

[biancaerazo-blog]

Surrealism

Once Dali, one of the most famous surrealists wrote “I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone” 

that always intrigues me, a bit confused? Me too Let’s go all the way to the beginning. Surrealism began in the 1920s, it had everything to do with experimenting with your imagination. Freud was an inspiration for many surrealists, he thought and wrote about the mind memories and human instincts. Surrealists make the unexpected, they put objects together that we don’t normally see. Like a starfish and a shoe in this painting below by Marcel Mariën. 

There are two types of surrealist artworks. One is a about dreams one example would be Paul Nash’s Landscape from a Dream.

 If you were to draw your dream what would it look like? Surrealists liked to look at dark objects and things that couldn’t be easily explained, just like nightmares. The second type of surrealism is called automatism. It is just like the name says, do things automatically! Without thinking. For example when I say blue what do you think about? The ocean? The sky? One example is Joan Miró’s The Great Carnivore. 

It’s like a big doodle which he then created a monster from! Quite a bit of Surrealist artwork uses collage which personally is my favorite, like this artwork by Sir Roland Penrose. 

[mrb33]

ART MOOCHING a GO-GO!

Some of the Art I've seen over the last few weeks:

'Of Royal and Noble Descent'

Sotheby's viewing exhibition:

PORTRAIT OF SIR CHARLES NAPIER (1782-1853) KICKING UP THE DUST - Attributed to Major-General Walter Fane 

German Empire Rocking Cradle (probably Leipzig) c1825

Follower of Guido Reni - SUSANNAH AND THE ELDERS

Follower of Jacopino del Conte - LUCRETIA

London ART FAIR

Leon Underwood 1929

Fiona Watson - ‘Just Saying’

Fiona Watson - The Puddle Bathers

L. S. Lowry - Ladies and Gentlemen 1953

Bringing textiles to life - Perve Galeria: Regina Frank, Collection Tautologique & Moral in collaboration with Carlos Cabral Nunes

SEE MY SEPARATE VIDEO

Brian Eno (Light box) ‘A Time’ 2016

Daniel O’Neill - ‘Chaperoned’

John Kelly - Australian Landscape (on Butcher’s block) 1999/2000

Elaine Pamphilon - Jug with Fox and striped Bowl

Elaine Pamphilon - The Georgian Table

Elaine Pamphilon - The Alba painted on 31 January the anniversary of the shipwreck

Vic Fair - original artwork for 1978 re-release poster of Performance

Nana Shiomi - Woodcut ‘Sea Bowl Universe’

Nana Shiomi woodcut - A Bowl of Water

Henrietta Dubrey - Sea View

Egon Schiele - Dry Point etching

Andy warhol - ‘25 Cats Name Sam and one Blue Pussy’ 1954

My favourite ‘Sam’

John Craxton - Yellow Estuary landscape 1943

Paul Nash - sketch design for ‘The lady from The Sea’ 1922

Sunny Side Up

Josef  Albers at David Zwirmer – to 10 March 2017

Josef Albers - Study for Homage to the Square - 2 Grays between 2 Yellows (1961)

‘Looking at one thing

and thinking of something else’

Group show at Carroll/Fletcher gallery to 4 March 2017

Natascha Sadr Haghighian – I Can't Work Like This (2007) (nails and hammers)

'If animals didn't exist'

Sebastian Gordin at Rosenfeld Porcini to 9 February 2017

SEE MY SEPARATE VIDEO

'The People and things of Onomatopoeia'

Charles Avery at Pilar Corrias to 17 February 2017

(Detail)

'Miro And Life In General'

John Baldessari at Marian Goodman Gallery to 25 February

Annette Messager - Les Spectres des Couturieres (2015)

'Toute seule'

Group show at Gazelli Art House to 26 February 2017

Rebecca Allen - INSIDE  2016 FAR - OUT Interactive Virtual Reality art

Charltte Colbert – Mother and Child 2017

Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion

At Two Temple Place to 23 April 2017

An angry little Putto on the inner door of 2 Temple Place.

From The PRESS RELEASE: This major exhibition examines why radical artists and writers were drawn to the rolling hills, seaside resorts, and quaint villages

of Sussex in the first half of the 20th century and how, in the communities they created, artistic innovation ran hand in-hand with political, sexual and domestic experimentation.

Through over 120 works, the exhibition discovers intriguing connections between these enclaves of artists and the modernisms they represented. The art and craft of Eric Gill and David Jones in the Catholic community in Ditchling is compared with the paintings and interiors of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant at Charleston and the surrealist collaborations of Edward James and Salvador Dalí. The unexpected network of Serge Chermayeff, Eric Ravilious, László Moholy-Nagy, Henry Moore and John Piper is revealed; despite sharing socialist ideas, they produced very different artistic output from striking architecture and sculpture to innovative photography and film. Also included are the haunted watercoloursof Edward Burra in Rye and the surrealist photos by Eileen Agar, Paul Nash and Lee Miller demonstrate the often tense relationship between artists and their environment.

Sussex provided the inspiration but all these artists and writers were outsiders in their new surroundings. Never settling, some brought unconventional ideas, others found nightmares in the most picturesque of scenes, but ultimately they challenged the idea of Sussex as an idyllic escape.

David Jones - Madonna and Child in a Landscape 1924

David Jones - The Garden Enclose

John Piper – Beach and Starfish 5 sisters 1933-34

Eric Gill - Divine Lovers 1923

Eric Gill

Duncan grant - Venus and Adonis c1919

Gorgeous setting, and more stunning art from:

Frank Dobson, Vanessa Bell, Peggy Angus, , Edward Wadsworth, Hans Fiebusch, Eric Ravilious, Edward Burra, Photos by Edith Rimmington, Surreal paintings by Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff, Roland Penrose and

Lee Miller – Saul Steinberg adding finishing touches to long man of Wilmington

In the grounds of 2 Temple Place at the moment:

Antony Penrose - Steel Bullock 2012

Antony is the son of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose.

Modern British Art

from the collection of Swindon Museum and Art gallery at Osborne Samuel Gallery to 11 February 2017

Alfred wallis -Ship amid Tall waves (date unknown)

Michael Ayrton - Roman Window

Lucian Freud - Girl with a fig leaf 1947

EARTH AIR WATER

Michael Andrews - Gagosian Gallery to 25 March 2017

Lights VII: A Shadow 1974

(Detail)

The Cathedral, The Southern Faces/Uluru (Ayers Rock) 1987

Swimming Pool with Two Girls 1982

David Hockney Digital Drawings

 at Annely Juda to 25 March 2017

Book AND table are for sale!

iPAD drawing from his ‘Yosemite Suite’ 2011

another iPad drawing from his ‘Yosemite Suite’

and

Stealing Space

Richard Wilson – to 25 March 2017

Little Anthology

Tino Stefanoni - Jerome Zodo Gallery

THE COMPLETE EARLY ETCHINGS

(1961-1964)

DAVID HOCKNEY at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert to 10 March 2017

The Hypnotist

The Acrobat

The Arrival - The Rakes Progress

Art Revolutionaries

at Mayoral Gallery to 10 February 2017

Picasso ceramics and Julio Gonzalez bronze Masks

Alexander Calder - The Red Base 1969

Joan Miro - Metamorphose 1936

Joan Miro - Figures, Bird, Stars 1944

Alexander Calder (Untitled)

Strata

Amie Siegel at South London Gallery to 26 March 2017

A little lump of Trump – a fragment of pink marble from the lobby of  of New York City's  Trump Tower. Bought by the artist on eBay

FURTHER NOTES AND PRESS RELEASE INFORMATION STILL TO BE ADDED TO THIS BLOG POST.

[milenaolesinska]

Exposition Art Blog  Surrealism Roland Penrose

Sir Roland Algernon Penrose (14 October 1900 – 23 April 1984)".English Surrealist painter and poet, best known for his exhibitions and books about the work of his friends Picasso, Ernst, Miró, Man Ray, and Tàpies. He planned the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, which led to the establishment of an English Surrealist movement. His bold and enigmatic Surrealist paintings, drawings and objects are some of the most enduring images of the movement. He is best known for his post card collages, samples of which are found in major national collections worldwide. Tea hosts this exhibition which brings together pieces of this intellectual British artist and other works of his contemporaries and friends. "

www.exposition.com.pl