Surrealistic Sunday - Leonora Carrington (April 6, 1917 - May 25, 2011)

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I had a completely different post ready for this feature, until I saw the news on Friday that Leonora Carrington died at the age of 94.

Leonora Carrington  was a British-born Mexican surrealist painter and novelist. She was the lover and muse to Max Ernst, one of the main founders of the surrealism movement. Read more here, at Art Knowledge News. And the obituary in The Guardian.

"I didn't have time to be anyone's muse... I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist." --Leonora Carrington, 1983

The Friday Evening Nudes

The nudes of Edward Steichen

One of the most influential figures in the history of photography, Edward Steichen (1879-1973) was also one of the most prolific and diverse. No other photographer can claim a leading role among the Photo-Secessionists, vibrant innovation in fashion photography, chief photographer for Condé Nast's Vogue and Vanity Fair, war photography born of two world wars, signature celebrity portraiture, and the title of curator at MOMA/NY where he conceived the groundbreaking exhibition, The Family of Man, viewed by nine million people in thirty-eight countries.  more here

 

 1903

 Nude with Cat

 Torso

1902

In 1913 Alfred Stieglitz devoted a double issue of Camera Work to Steichen's photographs. He wrote in the magazine: "Nothing I have ever done has given me quite so much satisfaction as finally sending this number out into the world." 

(Dust Grain Sheet Fed Photogravure)

1905

"Every artist undresses his subject, whether human or still life. It is his business to find essences in surfaces, and what more attractive and challenging surface than the skin around a soul?"

~ Richard Corliss

Art Foraging - The Latest Catch

Online this week, I perused the work of David Alfaro Siqueros...

 Photographer Tina Modotti...

three Andrew Wyeth paintings I was previously unfamiliar with...

and these fascinating images of our planet Earth, from the exhibition Earth As Art, at the Library of Congress

and lastly, a rare photo of Andy Warhol by William John Kennedy
article here