pensando en ti: REAL/SURREAL

Note: I began this post on 02/10/2012 as an attempt to share with Bart what had caught my eye at the Whitney's Real/Surreal Exhibit. It's unfinished, and I'm afraid I won't get around to finishing it. So rather than it just sitting around as a draft, I shall post what I have so far.

Whitney Museum: REAL/SURREAL Exhibit (Oct. 6, 2011–Feb. 12, 2012)

The pieces in this collection are drawn from the Whitney's permanent collection and deal with decades surrounding World War II. According to Freud, "the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced." For a portion of this visit, Aileen and I tagged along a tour group for this exhibit, which was led by an older man who seemed very passionate about the works he chose to highlight . Along the way, we gained a lot of fun facts about several of the work and its composers.

This isn't the particular piece I saw at the Real/Surreal exhibit, but it illustrates the same juxtaposition of machinery (a carburetor) next to an organic object (an onion), which my tour guide so eloquently called a partnership that spawns a "sense of melancholy" in this technologically driven day and age.

Walter Tandy Murch (1907-1967), Carburetor, 1957. Oil on canvas.

Again, this isn't the work I saw, but it gives you a good idea of Wilde's style. The work I saw at the exhibit was called Work Reconsidered #1, 1950, which immediately attracted my attention because of its similarity to Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting -- in the background, Wilde blends grays, blues and blacks to evoke a vast desert-like space, which sharply contrasts with the pallid female, who sits in three-quarters view and consumes the midground. She's bare from the waist up, but positioned with her right elbow, which leans on the table in the foreground in such a way that her areolas and nipples, but not the curvature of her breasts, are concealed. Exceptionally detailed insects rest on her exposed skin (Aileen was freaked out by cockroach [yes, it was that detailed!] in between the lower curve of her right breast and the border of her scapula). I could go on and on about the details of Wilde's Work Reconsidered #1, 1950, but within the context of this exhibit/post, what I found most compelling was the artist's ability to re-contextualize the Northern European Renaissance style into one that fit the Surrealist movement.

John Wilde (1919-2006), In the Hand, 1957. Oil on tempered masonite.

I came across Yves Tanguy earlier this year as I walked around the Met, and I took pictures of his work because I couldn't understand it. The tour guide stated how Tanguy was heavily influenced by de Chirico and that during World War I, the artist was drafted to war but France never sent him to the battle grounds because the officials knew he was an artist (this is to the advantage of Tanguy, but that's corrupt behavior). Check out the biomorphic objects -- their color is so similar to that of bone.