OLD NEWS

BORN ON THIS DAY IN 1621, IN DELFT, EGBERT VAN DER POEL.
Famed for chronicling disaster & destruction.
So appropriate!
Here, village being plundered and burned at night.
<https://tinyurl.com/82x9t726>
Even Egbert van der Poel’s ordinary buildings
seem to have been struck by catastrophe,
as with this farmyard.
<https://tinyurl.com/mr484ncs>
Shoppers at the fish market in Delft, 1650,
by Egbert van der Poel.
<https://tinyurl.com/4vpx6rc2>
Early hours of a Dutch winter morning:
fish market by Egbert van der Poel of Delft,
<https://tinyurl.com/mr3bssca>
Disaster of Delft:
gunpowder store explodes in 1654,
leveling nearly the entire city,
& Egbert van der Poel records over and over
the horror & shock of the survivors.
Today is his explosive day.
<https://tinyurl.com/2v5nbd6d>
Woe and tragedy after the great Delft explosion of 1654,
that killed Carel Fabritius (of Goldfinch fame) and many others.
And was immortalized by Egbert
<https://tinyurl.com/5cdtmn22>
Pillage of a village at night.
One of many depressing scenes of urban destruction
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Egbert van der Poel (born OTD 1621):
Explosion of the Delft powder magazine in 1654.
Great disaster of Dutch Golden Age.
<https://tinyurl.com/ybnps5w2>
Whee! Church goes up in flames!
Exciting scene by Egbert van der Poel,
who loved a good catastrophe.
<https://tinyurl.com/397p23xr>
Aftermath of the great Delft explosion of 1654:
survivors, in state of shock, outside their ruined city.
By Egbert van der Poel, documenter of disaster,
<https://tinyurl.com/4ce9zrfv>
Fire in the Amsterdam Town Hall,
attributed (by some) to Egbert van der Poel.
And why not?
He'd never let a good fire go to waste.
<https://tinyurl.com/yf3pryx9>
Passages in a tower.
Marvelous (and very calm) work by Egbert v
who tended more toward catastrophe.
<https://tinyurl.com/2zxpeacs>
Nearly two hundred years later,
an enclosed winding staircase
also intrigued Caspar David Friedrich in 1825.
<https://tinyurl.com/3ybdusxz>
Wild nights in the Dutch Golden Age:
festivity by torchlight in Delft,
<https://tinyurl.com/f3ywfmp3>
Metalsmith in his workshop at dusk,
focussed on his tasks.
As depicted by Egbert van der Poel,
whose day was today.
<https://tinyurl.com/mvumzkt5> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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CLAUDE CAHUN AND MARCEL MOORE: SURREALIST LOVERS WHO DEFIED THE GERMAN OCCUPATION
<https://tinyurl.com/36hbsw22>
They were as intertwined as two people could be. Lovers and avant-garde collaborators, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore even played Dadaist tricks on the Nazis and nearly paid with their lives..
The 20th-century photographers Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore might not be well-known names even today. Certainly, in their lifetimes, they never achieved artistic fame. But these two visionary, gender non-conforming artists left behind creative legacies that, to today’s eyes, are still startlingly radical.
Now, a new exhibition, “And I Saw New Heavens and a New Earth,” at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis brings to life the worlds of these two artists, offering a nuanced, tender, and enlightening consideration of both the art they made and the values they embodied.
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Curated by Dean Daderko, the museum’s chief curator, and Svetlana Kitto, a writer and oral historian, the exhibition embraces an experimental storytelling approach and encompasses drawings, elaborate photomontages, and intimate portraits made over their lifetimes.
“Beyond just work, there is an incredible story of two people,” said Kitto. “Here are two women who photographed each other for the entirety of their lives together.”
The exhibition also aims to complicate the assumed roles of authorship and agency between the two artists.
For art historians and scholars of queer history, Cahun has long been the better-known name. Since the 1990s, a handful of androgynous portraits of the artist have circulated in exhibitions, becoming a shorthand of their practice. Moore, on the other hand, has largely been passed over as a creative force, if not overlooked entirely.
“Many people know the work and the name Claude Cahun, but they don’t know anything about Marcel Moore or about this relationship that really was the governing force in these two people’s lives from a very young age,” Daderko said.
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Here, those distinctions dissolve. “It felt really important to complicate the idea that these were simply Cahun’s portraits and to consider that the work may have been a collaboration,” said Kitto.
The exhibition also highlights the artists’ little-known work made in Nazi-occupied Jersey during World War II, and, in doing so, underscores the incredible power art can have in the face of oppression.
Kindred Spirits
Marcel Moore was born Suzanne Malherbe in 1892; Cahun as Lucy Schwob, in 1894. Both women were from well-to-do families in Nantes, France, and met while teenagers.
Cahun’s father was the editor of a progressive Jewish newspaper called the Nantes Lighthouse. Her mother had suffered from mental health challenges and was permanently institutionalized. Her father was granted a divorce, which was unusual for the era.
While still teenagers, the two became lovers. Moore’s father, a doctor, supported their relationship, even early on, and eventually the families would achieve an equilibrium. “The families began to associate with each other,” said Kitto. “They initially prohibited the relationship, but then realized that wasn’t working.” Cahun is believed to have struggled with her mental health, and her father, recognizing the benefits Moore’s company provided, embraced a more welcoming and approving stance.
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Both Cahun’s parents would pass away; some time after, Cahun’s father and Moore’s mother married one another.
The marriage may have been a strategic decision to protect the young women. “The marriage certainly allowed them freedom. When they moved to Jersey, people on the island called the two of them ‘the sisters,’ even though they were really lovers,” said Daderko.
Creativity was at the heart of their relationship from the beginning. One of the earliest works in the exhibition is a drawing from 1909 that bears the initials LSM—an intertangling of their given names at birth, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe.
“The initials, LSM, if you’re a French speaker, sound like ‘elles aiment,’ which means ‘they love each other,’” Daderko explained.
New Names, New Identity, New City
By the mid-1910s, the artists had adopted the names Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, monikers that reflected their liberated understanding of gender.
“Both of them chose names that would have been, at the time, considered gender neutral or neuter gender—names that could have been given either to masculine or feminine people,” said Daderko.
The exhibition includes photographs from these years, around 1914 and 1915. “These are some of the earliest images we know of that they made of each other,” said Kitto.
<https://tinyurl.com/m2bef5c3>
While it would be anachronistic to use the term non-binary, the artists espoused a fluid understanding of gender. In Cahun’s semi-autobiographical 1930 book Aveux non avenus (Disavowals), she writes of herself using feminine pronouns but also adds, “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”
In 1920, the young artists left Nantes for Paris. During these years, Cahun identified as a writer, while Marcel was a visual artist interested in illustration. “In Paris, they fell in with the Surrealists and were friends with André Breton and crossed paths with a lot of people in those circles,” said Kitto.
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“And I Saw New Heavens and a New Earth” includes a section devoted to their Paris years, from 1920 to 1937. The most famous among these is a striking 1927 portrait of Cahun wearing theatrical makeup, seated with her legs crossed, wearing a top bearing the words “I am training, don’t kiss me.” It is an image both coy and playful.
Other photographs, rarely shown, capture the artists playing with cats or relaxing at the beach; these photographs are Surrealist but intimate arrangements. Some of the portraits of Cahun, meanwhile, are shot from angles far above her and underscore Moore’s involvement in constructing these images.
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“There is a range of images from studio portraits—the more performative images—and also intimate domestic portraits they made of each other over the course of their lives,” said Daderko.
Among the delights of the exhibition are a series of photomontages Moore created for Cahun’s memoir, Aveux non avenus, published in 1930. In these works, lips, hands, eyes, faces, and decorative elements are rearranged in kaleidoscopic compositions.
One of the collages includes the words “Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.” The words suggest the artists’ lifelong journey of self-discovery and what today might be called gender self-determination as a lifelong process.
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In this curation, Moore gains a creative agency long denied to her and, in doing so, draws out a shared, non-hierarchical creative dynamic that Cahun and Moore fostered and upends the lone genius narrative that art history so often embellishes.
“If Marcel Moore had been a man taking these photographs of this extraordinary person in all these costumes, it would immediately have been assumed that this was a muse situation,” said Kitto. “The photographer would probably have been understood very differently. The reason it was not is quite simple: misogyny, blindness, and homophobia.”
For Kitto, their relationship is key to fully understanding the work. “Not only was it a collaboration, but it was really intimate work that describes a queer relationship,” she added.
The Art of Resistance
Cahun and Moore faced the horrors of war firsthand. Living in Paris, anti-Semitism and conservatism were on the rise. For Cahun, who was Jewish, the environment became increasingly inhospitable. “Claude especially was involved in leftist circles and was writing a lot about political thought—writing for Marxist papers, writing about labor, writing about art, and at one point writing about homosexuality as well,” explained Kitto.
In 1937, seeking refuge, the couple moved to Jersey in the Channel Islands, where they had vacationed with their families in childhood. But in a cruel twist of fate, the Nazis seized control of the island in 1940.
While many evacuated, the artists decided to stay. In the end, they endured a military lockdown that lasted from 1940 to 1944. “They chose to stay as an act of resistance,” said Daderko. “They were surrounded by violence and death on Jersey. They saw people starving in the streets, they saw people tortured, they saw executions.”
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Few works remain from 1939 to 1945. During these years, the two artists performed Dada-inspired interventions they hoped would spark dissent within German military ranks. Creating what they called “paper bullets,” the artists would sneak notes into the pockets of German soldiers.
“They signed these notes ‘Soldier With No Name,’ posturing as a soldier who was questioning the Nazi effort and wanting to defect,” said Daderko. “Sometimes they wrote in German, sometimes in Hungarian. Sometimes things were typed, sometimes written in pencil. They were trying to suggest that there wasn’t just one soldier questioning the morality of what was happening, but many.”
Eventually, in 1944, Cahun and Moore’s project was uncovered, and the artists were arrested. The Nazis struggled to believe the two women, now in their 50s, had enacted the plot on their own.
“All of this work they were able to do because they were seen as two eccentric older women. No one thought of them as a lesbian couple, and certainly no one thought of them as resistance fighters,” said Kitto. Still, the women were sentenced to death. The island was liberated before their execution, however. The artists would continue to live on Jersey for the rest of their lives, and the exhibition includes a striking photographic self-portrait from 1945 showing Cahun clenching a Nazi eagle badge between her teeth.
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“They risked their lives to do this work,” said Daderko, “and it did have an effect.”
After the war, the couple remained in Jersey. Cahun, who had struggled with her health all her life, died in 1954. Marcel Moore planned her gravestone in the churchyard next to their home, which reads “And I saw new heavens and a new earth,” the title of the exhibition.
Reanimating a Lost Legacy
The remarkable story of Cahun and Moore would be lost to history if not for an auction fluke.
During the Nazi occupation, the couple’s home was raided, and most of their work was destroyed. When the artists died, they left no estate. Marcel Moore died in 1972, and the couple’s estate was auctioned as they left no heirs. “Their work was inadvertently bought by a gentleman who lived on Jersey,” said Daderko. “He thought he was buying some old wooden tea chests. Inside them was all of this material that Moore and probably Cahun had hidden away somehow—maybe in an attic or a corner of the house.”
In 1990, that work was donated to the Jersey Heritage Trust on the island. Later, in 2000, the Trust acquired a second, smaller group of materials that had also been found. “Most of the material had never really been shared publicly during Cahun and Moore’s lifetimes,” explained Daderko. “They weren’t exhibiting artists in their time.”
Daderko can’t help but see the works as a gift from the past, and the exhibition as a chance to consider artistic relevance in the contemporary moment. “With the rise of right-wing, authoritarian governments all over the world, presenting the work of two artists who were practicing gender self-determination before there was even language for it feels incredibly important,” he said. “In the face of regimes that would have rather crushed them, art became resistance work.” _Katie White _artnet

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THIS YEAR AS YOU CELEBRATE PI(E) DAY,
remember to do so ethically.
In the words of filmmaker Mack Sennett,
"A mother never gets hit with a custard pie. Mothers-in-law, yes.
But mothers? Never."
<https://tinyurl.com/4ac6w2u5> _JesseLocker

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SPAIN’S COSMIC MOTHER OF MODERNISM by Lauren Moya Ford
<https://tinyurl.com/22ssuar8>
The most famous portrait of Maruja Mallo depicts the artist covered from head to toe in seaweed. She is crowned and draped with long, rope-like strands of kelp, her arms raised triumphantly like an all-powerful marine goddess. This unconventional photograph, snapped in 1945 by the poet Pablo Neruda on a Chilean beach, was no doubt carefully orchestrated by the Spanish artist, who viewed herself as an extension of her unique work, where female energy is a conduit for natural and even cosmic forces.
Maruja Mallo: Mask and Compass at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is the Mallo’s largest retrospective to date. Featuring 100 paintings, some 70 drawings, and 100 archival documents — including the aforementioned photo — the expansive presentation traces her entire career trajectory. Curator Patricia Molins has taken great care in elaborating a wide view of the artist’s exceptionally varied oeuvre; in addition to her major two-dimensional artworks, we’re privy to her published writings, photographic self-portraits, and meticulous, quasi-scientific notebooks, as well as recreations of her lost set designs and ceramic works.
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Born Ana María Gómez González in Viveiro, Galicia, in 1902, Mallo studied art at the prestigious Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. There, she befriended art and literature luminaries like Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, and Federico García Lorca, and became part of the groundbreaking Generación del ’27 group, which produced avant-garde writing, poetry, and art in Spain in the 1920s and ’30s.
Early in her career, she was associated with other influential art movements and collectives, including the Surrealists, the Escuela de Vallecas, and the Grupo de Arte Constructivo. Ultimately, though, her vision was so completely distinct, and her work so idiosyncratic, that she became alienated from her peers, which perhaps accounts for her lack of name recognition outside of Spain.
Three decades after her death, the exhibition enshrines Mallo as one of the most singular and innovative artists of the 20th century. It also makes a case for her as an important representative of women in art and modern life. Her defiant early paintings portray nude or nearly nude athletic women confidently swimming or bicycling, activities that mainstream Spanish society saw as immodest and improper for women at the time. (A photograph of Mallo’s portrait of a friend wearing a bathing suit, which was promptly destroyed by the model’s indignant father, is on view to underscore social standards of the time.)
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Mallo’s vibrant Verbenas (Street Fairs) series — reunited for the first time since they were originally exhibited in Madrid in 1928 — are carnivalesque celebrations of fast-paced urban life that center active, modern women. In “La verbena” (1927), for example, two smiling women in short, form-fitting dresses step boldly out of kaleidoscopic scenes of revelry and toward the viewer; their open arms seem to lead the energetic parade of life itself.
These works, inspired by popular art, cinematic montage, and theater, give way to the artist’s Cloacas y Campanarios (Sewers and Bell Towers) paintings. The arresting images were made after her breakup with poet Rafael Alberti, yet their motifs — dark, desolate landscapes populated only by trash, skeletons, and excrement — seem to eerily predict the coming devastation of the Spanish Civil War. When the conflict broke out, she was sketching local fishermen in the small coastal Galician town of Bueu. She was forced to flee to Portugal, and later to Argentina, where she settled in 1937. But these Galician drawings eventually became the foundation for one of her most significant series, La religión del trabajo (The Religion of Work). In these monumental paintings, heroic female figures wield scythes, sheaves of wheat, nets, and fish. For instance, the large-scale oil painting “Canto de las espigas” (1939) shows three identical women, each with raised hands and framed by stalks of wheat that intersect delicately behind their heads like halos. Here, as in the photo of Mallo covered in seaweed, women are statuesque and self-sufficient. They symbolize an eternal and fortifying link to the natural world. By contrast, men are not present, nor do they seem necessary. All compositions from this series are precisely mapped according to theories of visual harmony and precision that would preoccupy the artist for the rest of her career (hence the word “compass” in the exhibition’s title).
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In Argentina, Mallo met fellow artists in exile like Jorge de Oteiza and Luis Seoane, but it was South America’s flora, fauna, and unique blend of religions, cultures, and people that stimulated her the most. Shells and flowers resemble reproductive organs and sex acts in her sensual series Las naturalezas vivas (Living Nature Works) while a fascinating group of portraits feature sitters of ambiguous race and gender, reflecting the artist’s belief in universality rather than divisions between people, plants, and the cosmos. In fact, Mallo incorporated mathematical concepts like geometry into her art because they enabled her to manifest her faith in a highly organized and universal order.
The show’s most enigmatic and haunting works are a number of paintings that portray masks floating above beaches, acrobats, and butterflies. Created in the 1940s and 50s before her return to Spain in 1965, they are pervaded by feelings of transformation and alienation, which seem to speak to Mallo’s complex position as an exile and a lifelong nonconformist, as well as her interest in psychoanalysis.
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By the 1970s, Mallo had discarded the earthly plane entirely in her art. Her final bodies of work, Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers), present diatom-like entities that appear to be microscopic and mystical at the same time. Perhaps it’s fitting that an artist whose creations were otherworldly in her day looked increasingly to space as a site of inspiration. Through this exhibition, she might finally secure her place in the earthly canon of modernist masters. _Hyperallergic

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ALEKSANDR DEINEKA STILL LIFE WITH AZALEA AND APPLES, 1937
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Aleksandr Deineka, Phlox in a Red Jug, 1960
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Félix Vallotton, Jug and Hydrangea, 1921
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Odilon Redon, Flowers: Poppies and Daisies;, c.1867
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Ohara Shoson, Chrysanthemum and Stream, 1931
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Piet Mondrian - Red Chrysanthemum on Blue Background - ca.1910
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Egon Schiele, White Chrysanthemum, 1910
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Egon Schiele, Field of Flowers, 1910
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Gabriele Münter Fuchsia in Front of a Moonlit Landscape (1928)
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Egon Schiele - Fuchsia Branches (Sun Tree), 1910
<https://tinyurl.com/u8dz26yz>
Charles Burchfield, "Yellow Flowers", 1915
<https://tinyurl.com/yc8de8hm> _RabihAlameddine