Mary Ann Caws Ordre des livres (chronologique)

A biography of the flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde Mina Loy.

Food has always been a favourite subject of the world's artists, from still-lifes by Matisse and Picasso to the works of Claes Oldenberg and Andy Warhol. But how do artists eat? The Modern Art Cookbook provides a window into how both great and lesser-known modern artists, writers and poets ate, cooked, depicted and wrote about food.

Es ist höchste Zeit, einen frischen Blick auf das Jahrhundertgenie zu werfen. In den letzten Jahren sind sehr wichtige Forschungsergebnisse zu den unterschiedlichsten Einzelaspekten in Leben und Werk des spanischen Künstlers vorgelegt worden, sodass eine flüssig zu lesende Überblicksschau heute mehr denn je nottut. Genau das leistet hier Mary Ann Caws, die Grande Dame der amerikanischen Surrealismusforschung. Sie ist für diese Aufgabe prädestiniert. Denn sie gilt nicht nur als eine der weltweit besten Spezialistinnen auf dem Feld französischer Kultur und Literatur, sondern besitzt auch schriftstellerisches Talent: Sie hat – neben ihrer Hochschultätigkeit – Romane und Gedichte veröffentlicht, die in den USA auf viel Resonanz gestoßen sind. In ihrem Picasso-Buch konzentriert sich die Autorin auf das Netz der Beziehungen um den Maler, auf die Geliebten und Musen, auf die Familienangehörigen und Kinder, die Schriftstellerfreunde und Kunsthändler. So entsteht ein zeitgenössisches, sehr lebendig gezeichnetes Bild von Picasso, welches die Gewichte anders lagert, als dies bisher geschehen ist.

"She was to be Picasso's lover and muse for seven years. In that time she photographed him at work and play, in the studio and on the beach, alone or with friends such as Man Ray, Andre Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and Paul Eluard. In early 1957 she created a unique photographic record of the painting of Guernica, Picasso's searing protest against the carnage of the Spanish Civil War. Dora's own features were immortalized in the lamp-bearing woman in Guernica and in the harrowing distortions of the Weeping Woman, the image in which Picasso achieved his most acute expression of the public and private anguish of those years.".

"Having the freedom of our perceptual conviction," writes Mary Ann Caws, "would mean the ability at once to challenge institutional presentations and individual visions and to invent our own fictions of seeing." In The Art of Interference Caws argues for a "personally passionate criticism," emphasizing that reading texts of literature and visual art can never be a fixed and closed process. She addresses the issues of how to look for, read, and know what is important when considering literary and visual works and how to establish relations and enhance "seeing" by such techniques as framing, bridging, fragmenting, integrating, and multiplying. These chapters are filled with Caws's own readings, which demonstrate the richness of connection-making. Written in a free, unpedantic style, this book opens up works to the imagination, making many original and significant connections between texts and art works. The author covers various movements in modern literature, art, and architecture, such as modernism, Dadaism, surrealism, concretism, and spatialism. In so doing, she draws relationships between painting and poetry, analyzing, among others, the work of Tintoretto, Van Gogh, Cornell, Stevens, Bataille, Mallarm, Derrida, and Arakawa.