Welcome to a new term and a new project. This term looking forward to the summer sun, taking more pictures and really getting excited about making a new project.
So to start the term I was looking through the images in George Bataille's book The Tears of Eros and this one I very much enjoyed. Mainly as I didn't know much about Labisse and therefore I thought I would start with him this term.
Félix Labisse (March 9, 1905 – January 27, 1982) was a French Surrealist painter, illustrator, and designer. Labisse designed sets and costumes for many theatre productions in his lifetime including; "The Martyrdom of San Sebastián" by Gabriele d'Annunzio and Claude Debussy at the Théâtre National de l'Opéra, "Paris - Magic" by Lise Deharme and Germaine Tailleferre at the Opéra-Comique and Partage de Midi" by Paul Claudel directed by Jean-Louis Barrault.
His painting however are what I am interested in here - Poetic morning has an array of artists and writers who sit together with two women both of which have become objects, mannequins. Apollinaire holds the model standing around the waist as you might a shop dummy and the other woman lays prostrate in the chair with a head painted like a Picasso. The scene is cold as there is no connection through eye contact of any of the participants in the image. they star into space almost in jest of the painting itself, they knowingly cannot sit in a room together and they have been posed and dressed just like the women in the scene. This alien scene with its unwilling participants becomes more interesting as it disturbs the normal sense of the portrait where elements bring the sitters together - here they are intentionally separated and individualised.
This disturbance interests me....
References
Bataille G. (1989) The Tears of Eros, City Lights Books, San Francisco
