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WOLFGANG PAALEN

As Europe was moving towards representative art under the Surrealist guidance of André Breton, a counter-insurgency was brewing. In their shared city of Paris, a group of artists that included Paalen formed Abstraction-Creation as a rebellion against the surrealist style that was dominating the cultural epoch. It embraced the entire field of abstract art amongst it’s many members, but prioritised the austere; geometric forms, mathematical compositions and reductively elegant shapes stood proudly in the face of the figurative subconscious. Yet Paalen, like many other members of the group, eventually succumbed to the allure of Surrealism and became a fully fledged member of the group. It was only once part of it’s fabric did he truly understand what it was he had rebelled against in the first place, finding the pseudo-religious, obsessively interior motifs of the surrealists as an insufficient way to true spirituality and enlightenment. He abandoned the group and spent years in exile in Mexico, pioneering a new, uniquely Paalen form of art that combined ideas of quantum theory with totemism, psycho-analysis and Marxist critique.

Leda and the Swan

PAUL CÉZANNE

In Metamorphoses by Ovid, amongst the greatest of the Roman poets, the story of Leda and the swan is one of consensual eroticism. This is at odds with other accounts of the myth, where the level of consent in the relationship differs wildly, though all see Zeus take the shape of a swan and have sexual relations with Leda that result in children. Yet it was Ovid’s telling that took up favour in the Renaissance. This was not least because the depiction of erotic acts between humans was firmly forbidden and so the Roman story was a suitable vehicle for artists to express a human sexuality otherwise forbidden by the church. Cézanne, some centuries removed from this vogue, choses the same subject matter and for much the same reason. The most explicitly erotic paintings of his oeuvre, his rendering of Leda and the Swan is overtly sensual, with Leda’s hips turned towards the viewer and the swan wrapping around her wrist as his wings rise. Yet the painting speaks to classicism, and its eroticism is well dressed in a literary academia and rich in aesthetic value, Cézanne’s loose brushstrokes and subtle colours bringing a melancholy, erotic beauty to the scene that, nonetheless, feels a weight of historical context.

Head of a Woman

PABLO PICASSO

‘The masks weren’t like other kinds of sculptures’, said Picasso when talking about the African art that influenced and inspired him, ‘they were magical things’. It was this implacable power that most informed him, above any sense of visual order or identity, it was the way in which the masks pointed to a higher level of existence and seemed to understand the totality of humanity in all of its contradictions. So much of the earth-shaking revolution that Picasso would bring to the art world started out of this aspirational influence. As he further developed Cubism alongside Braque, for this is a particularly early work of the movement, the multiplicity of perspectives would get larger, more overt and more severe, but they all strove for the same goal that the African masks did almost effortlessly – capture the truth that life can never be truly seen from one perspective.

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The Bells

Paul Zweig

A poet, critic and memoirist, Zweig was admired by his friends and the literary circles around him, but remains in wider obscurity to this day. Zweig was an obsessive study of culture, peoples and moods. Cross pollination is clear in Zweig’s work, his techniques as a memoirist clear across his poetry. A careful and astute eye, self-possessed and self-aware, he wrote as if with a magnifying glass, looking at the offhand nature of the world and reading the truth from it. While he looked outwards, he found himself everywhere. He journeyed deeper into the self with each evocative work.

Imagine Lucifer

Jack Spicer

Spicer saw the poet as a radio, intercepting transmissions from outer space. Language was furniture, through which information navigated. He was a radical, both in his literary style and in his life, defying every convention at every turn. Refusing to allow his work to be copyrighted, Spicer ran a workshop called ‘Poetry as Magic’, and for him the statement was true. Poetry was a means to experience and translate the unexplainable, and had to be freely available for those who searched for truth. Spicer died penniless and with only small acclaim, like so many poets before and after him, but the ideas he laid out in his work have gone on to influence thousands of poets after him.

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka was many things, and many things to many people. The most significant black poet of his generation, Baraka also is considered the founder of the Black Arts Movement and the Second Harlem Renaissance. Baraka wanted poetry, literature and art to be a legitimate product of experience. In doing so, he could hold a mirror up to a world in desperate need of self reflection. He was as fearless in his writing as he was in his activism, and he had a clear vision. The BAM became an aesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power and Baraka’s voice was the most poignant, cutting and profound.