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cellar spiders

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Albert Camus, from a letter to María Casares featured in Correspondance, 1944-1959

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Sylvia Plath, from a diary entry featured in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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Chestnut vendor, Baltimore, 1904.

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Ōtomo no Yakamochi, from a poem featured in From the country of Eight Islands; an anthology of Japanese Poetry

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Alfred de Musset, from a translated letter to George Sand, featured in «Ô mon George, ma belle maîtresse...»: Lettres

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“Each individual reserves the right to ruin his or her life as quietly or as flamboyantly as he chooses.“

Source details and larger version.

Lots of interesting stills from the one-and-only Dark Shadows.

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Uroczystość Bożego Ciała w Złakowie Kościelnym (1937-1938).

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Prof. Alfred Gysi, Oscillation paths

These images are published in the article : “Artistry of the Pendulum” by Hans Naef on page 436 of Graphis, N°16 1946.

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Yuri Kochiyama, b. May 19, 1921 / 2026

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Au hasard Bresson (1967) dir. Theodor Kotulla

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psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, it puts to sleep the anti-objective impulses of man and systematizes the bourgeoisie — tristan tzara

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Marcel Duchamp stands as one of the most radical and influential figures in twentieth-century art, not because of the volume of his work but because of the way he dismantled the very definition of art itself. Trained as a painter in the Cubist and Fauvist circles of Paris, Duchamp quickly became disillusioned with the idea of art as mere visual pleasure. His 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 scandalized audiences and marked the beginning of his lifelong commitment to challenging aesthetic convention.

His true genius emerged in the invention of the readymade: ordinary manufactured objects recontextualized as art through the artist’s choice. A bottle rack, a snow shovel, or most famously, a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” and titled Fountain (1917), became artworks not through craftsmanship but through concept. In this gesture, Duchamp shifted the locus of art from the eye to the mind, asserting that the idea could be more important than the object. This single innovation dismantled centuries of tradition and paved the way for conceptual art, Pop art, and postmodernism.

Duchamp’s brilliance also lay in his wit and subversion. He cultivated irony and play, whether in his alter ego “Rrose Sélavy,” his cryptic wordplay, or his manipulation of chance operations. He blurred boundaries between art and life, seriousness and humor, originality and reproduction. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Duchamp was less interested in creating masterpieces than in questioning the very conditions under which art exists.

By undermining the sanctity of the art object, Duchamp liberated generations of artists to think beyond technique, medium, and market. His work asked: Who decides what art is? Where does meaning come from? In refusing to settle for easy answers, Duchamp transformed art into a field of infinite possibility, making him one of the true geniuses of modern culture.

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Surreal Saturday: Max Ernst

Max Ernst, by Irish author and photographer Edward Quinn (1920–1997), was published in Paris by Éditions Cercle d'art in 1976. Ernst and Quinn worked very closely together on this book, resulting in a work that is autobiographical, with images of its 400 paintings, collages, prints, and drawings personally approved by Ernst. Additional essays are provided by noted art historians Uwe M. Schneede and Diane Waldman, and by art critic and surrealist specialist Patrick Waldberg.

Max Ernst’s (1891-1976) artistic career can be traced through multiple styles and eras. When he first began to draw, his stylistic expression seemed to take greater inspiration from Expressionism. After fighting in World War I, Ernst, like many German men who had been on the frontline, came back jaded. Following his return home, he became interested in the Dadaist movement that had begun to form in Germany and established the Cologne Dada group with a few of his friends. Although Ernst was born in Germany, the majority of his artistic career was in Paris, France, moving there in 1922 and leaving his wife and son behind. No longer a Dadaist, Ernst became entrenched in the Surrealist movement and today is remembered as one of the leading Surrealist artists in Paris at the time.

Ernst’s style is dreamlike; the surrealist quality of the figures jumps dramatically from the ethereal to the nightmarish. In one painting, a strange creature dances across a desert landscape—in another the crucifixion of Jesus takes place somewhere dark, jagged, and sharp. The images shared here are only a small sample of Ernst’s work, but the variety in what he creates is impressive. In some, he has fragmented his figures into shapes, constructing the painting like building blocks. For others his human figures are realistic but retain the surrealist features that mark them as Ernst classics. Beside paintings, his works also include sculptures, collages, poetry, and prints.