Werner Spies

#2

"By the mid-1970s, Andy Warhol was veering away from his earlier focus on mainstream celebrities and toward more eclectic subjects, such as the cross-dressers in his Ladies and Gentlemen series. In 1976, he made a series of paintings and drawings of the Native American actor and activist Russell Means. Starting with popular publicity shots, Warhol transferred these images to silkscreen and then printed them on canvases. Warhol presents Means with exaggerated, glamorized features; some of the canvases include hand-painted embellishments and decorations that distinguish this series from the mechanical approach of Warhol's earlier celebrity portraits. Through a combination of mass technology and ornamental technique, Warhol transforms a commonplace image into a dignified and majestic portrait that pays tribute to both an individual and his people"--Amazon.com, viewed November 13, 2013.

#3

Meret Oppenheim's early drawings and fashion designs, many of them published here for the first time, provide a welcome opportunity to explore the thoroughly improvised, experimental, and marginal approach of this extraordinary artist. Oppenheim created what might be called a "book of ideas." The spontaneity of her creative impulses weighed more heavily than quality as a criterion in selecting the drawings for publication. The artist had studios in Berne, Paris, and Carona (Ticino); it was the atmosphere of her immediate environment that dictated her working rhythm. Photographs of the family's home in Carona, the interior of which still bears Meret Oppenheim's signature, close the ring formed by her life, her work, and her passage through the world. This publication testifies to the open-minded attitude of an artist with enough confidence to "apply" her art, an attitude ironically demonstrated in 1936, when she created the "fur cup" that established her reputation but also labeled her a Surrealist for decades. "Applied art": for Meret Oppenheim that always meant the candid application of art to the realities of life.