What I've Been Reading
Exhibition catalogues, distractions and more.
I’m finally making my return to posting after a crazy couple of months. Thank you for bearing with me.
To ease back in today I’m talking you through a couple of the books I’ve been reading lately.
Picasso: Love and War 1935-1945: Life With Dora Maar
This is a catalogue from 2006 when the NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) held this exhibit as part of its Winter Masterpieces series. While the NGV remains one of my favourite places in the world, I was only 10 when this exhibition was in town and so it’s not one that I was fortunate enough to see.
It’s been really interesting reading this nonetheless. This has to be one of the most detailed catalogues I’ve ever seen—there is a huge amount of information in here, and I’ve taken very extensive notes. This is definitely worth trying to track down if you’re interested in the artistic and personal relationship between Picasso and Maar.
Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross
This one is definitely a departure (and distraction) from my solely Surrealist-focused reading, but the way that art affects our brains became vaguely relevant in one of the chapters I’m writing. This book had been on my reading list for a while and so I just decided to jump in.
This is going to have very little pay-off for that actual chapter—when I tell you this was vaguely relevant, I mean vaguely—but it’ll be an incredibly interesting read nonetheless.
Greek mythologies: antiquity and surrealism by Dimitrios Yatromanolakis
This one also isn’t entirely relevant to my research. As far as I can tell from what I’ve read, this doesn’t touch on female Surrealists much, if at all. But this is serving as background research to one of the women I’m looking into—Elena Calas, whose husband Nicolas Calas does feature heavily in this book. Whether I’ll find anything helpful about Elena at all remains to be seen.
Even if I don’t, it should also provide some good background for an article I’ve been thinking about writing for here about the representations of mythology in Surrealism (particularly Greek). This has been a slow read, but hopefully a worthwhile one.
Again, thank you for sticking with me while I’ve not been posting. I’m excited to get back into the swing of posting again.