MAN RAY

Like the stages of grief, a readymade object moved through ideas of destruction over forty years. When Man Ray first affixed the photograph of a women’s eye to a wooden metronome, it was merely to keep him company as he painted. The monotony of the metronome helped him regulate his brushstrokes, and he found he enjoyed the sensation of being watched by this detached voyeur until, in a moment of fury, he destroyed the metronome, birthing the artworks as ‘Object to Be Destroyed’. In the tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, the work caused a stir on debut and was regarded as a significant work of modern art almost immediately. Some 10 years later, Ray was left by his partner, the photographer Lee Miller, and replaced the anonymous eye on the metronome with a photograph of hers, renaming the work ‘Object of Destruction’ - its context changing from companion to judge, watching over him as a reminder of what he lost. In the 1950s, a group of Parisian student protesters broke into a museum showing the work and took Ray’s title seriously, destroying the original piece. Ray responded by creating 100 new editions, and titling it ‘Indestructible Object’, it’s context moving beyond the physical metronome and photograph and being an idea that can will live forever in the mind.

LEONOR FINI

“I paint pictures which don’t exist”, said Leonor Fini, “and which I would like to see”. But her quest to create worlds as she wanted them to exist extended far beyond her paintings and into the very fibre of her daily being. An Italian Argentinian, renowned for talent and beauty so much that she was known as the Queen of Paris during the 1930s, Fini blazed a trail defined by no one. She rejected the title of Surrealist, despite appearing in multiple exhibitions and publications and counting many of the surrealists as her closest friends and occasional lovers, as she refused to give up her independence to the often dictatorial whims of the group’s founder Andre Breton. She did not want to be defined, not as a female artist, nor one who depicted erotic scenes of lesbian love, but instead only wanted to create the world in her vision, unapologetically, and let everyone else follow behind.  

FRANK STELLA

With boundless creativity, and a seemingly endless will to experiment, Joseph Stella felt restrained by every country he inhabited. In his native Italy, he found the shadow of the Renaissance omnipresent, even in the fledgling futurist movement he could feel its presence and its constriction on his desire for the new. His first stint in America was challenging and unenjoyable, he found the land and climate unbearable and the nation not willing to accept the beauty of its modernity. Travels around Europe and time in Paris brought him into contact with increasingly more avant-garde movements, and he absorbed the principles of Cubism, Fauvism, and the now established Futurism. He took these movement with him and returned to America, finding the country more open to his restless mind, and accepting of the radical art he made. Stella is ultimately remembered for his cityscapes, his wild and energetic paintings of New York’s architecture, but this still life is notable for how elegantly it combines tradition, simplicity, with the sharp geometry and abstraction. It captures a man between worlds, who could absorb ideas from across time and place and create something uniquely his own.