Mary Ann Caws is een Amerikaanse auteur, kunsthistoricus en literair criticus wiens werk zich verdiept in de complexe verbanden tussen beeldende kunst en literaire teksten. Ze is een gerenommeerd expert op het gebied van het Surrealisme en de moderne Engelse en Franse literatuur, en onderzoekt de verbindingen tussen diverse artistieke vormen. Caws onderzoekt minutieus de levens en het oeuvre van belangrijke kunstenaars en schrijvers, en ontdekt diepgaande verbanden in hun creatieve productie. Haar literaire analyses worden geprezen om hun diepgang en unieke kijk op de kunstwereld.
Exploring the origins of the prose poem, this anthology features foundational works by iconic figures like William Blake and Charles Baudelaire, alongside lesser-known writers such as Judith Gautier and Elena Guro. It highlights the genre's unique embrace of hybridity across aesthetic, cultural, and political dimensions. The collection, edited by Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville, is essential for those interested in modern poetics and literary innovation, showcasing contributions from over 20 translators worldwide.
Alice Paalen Rahon was a shapeshifter, a surrealist poet turned painter who was born French and died a naturalized citizen of Mexico. Her first husband was the artist Wolfgang Paalen, among her lovers were Pablo Picasso and the poet Valentine Penrose, and over the years her circle of friends included Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Joan Miró, Paul Éluard, Man Ray, and Anaïs Nin. This bilingual edition of Rahon’s poems confirms the achievement of this little-known but visionary writer who defies categorization. Her spellbinding poems, inspired by prehistoric art, lost love, and travels around the globe, weave together dream, fantasy, and madness. For the first time in any language, this book gathers the three collections of poetry Rahon published in her lifetime, along with uncollected and unpublished poems and an album of portraits, manuscript pages, and artworks.
"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.
Originally published in 1990, Women of Bloomsbury takes a fresh look at the lives of Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Dora Carrington. Connected by more than bonds of friendship and artistic endeavour, the three women faced similar struggles. Juxtaposing their personal lives and their work, Mary Ann Caws shows us with feeling and clarity the pain women suffer in being artists and in finding - or creating - their sense of self. Relying on unpublished letters and diaries, as well as familiar texts, Caws give us a portrait of the female self in the act of creation.
A collection of highlights from Mary Ann Caws's long, highly distinguished career writing about literature, art, and modernism. Throughout her long, highly distinguished career writing about literature and art, Mary Ann Caws has excavated, illuminated, and examined in depth the most intriguing works and personalities of Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism, and beyond. In these concise, but always colorful and insightful articles, Caws brings us fresh portraits of the most famous figures and introduces us to the writers and artists who merit more attention than they've received, with a special focus on female writers and artists. The author's sensitivity to the intersections of eccentric literature and eccentric life infuses each critical essay with the human passions that these essential modernists lived. From Dickinson and Mallarmé to Duchamp and Mina Loy, Caws applies the art of close looking to shrewdly framed slices of the modernist experience.
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.
