Alyce Mahon

This study overhauls canonical accounts of Surrealism, demonstrating how one woman artist expanded its activity and expression in bold new ways for the modern age The life and art of Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) exemplify the transnational spirit and nomadic practice of Surrealism, an achievement made all the harder because the artist was a woman. In Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World we travel with Tanning across lived places and imagined spaces in Chicago, Arizona, Paris, and Seillans, through to her final years in New York. Expertly drawing from extensive archival and curatorial research to map the artist’s life story across a seventy-year career, Alyce Mahon situates Tanning at the very heart of avant-garde discussions on art and philosophical ideas. She explores how this circle of relationships informed Tanning’s work at critical moments of her career and how she navigated the difficulty of being the wife of a male artist already established on the international stage. Mahon demonstrates how Tanning’s work expanded postwar global Surrealism in offering a world of kaleidoscopic, constantly shifting perspectives.

How the notorious author of The 120 Days of Sodom inspired the surrealists and other avant-garde artists, writers, and filmmakersThe writings of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) present a libertine philosophy of sexual excess and human suffering that refuses to make any concession to law, religion, or public decency. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Alyce Mahon traces how artists of the twentieth century turned to Sade to explore political, sexual, and psychological terror, adapting his imagery of the excessively sexual and terrorized body as a means of liberation from systems of power. Mahon shows how avant-garde artists, writers, dramatists, and filmmakers drew on Sade's "philosophy in the bedroom" to challenge oppressive regimes and their restrictive codes and conventions of gender and sexuality. She provides close analyses of early illustrated editions of Sade's works and looks at drawings, paintings, and photographs by leading surrealists such as André Masson, Leonor Fini, and Man Ray. She explains how Sade's ideas were reflected in the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire and the fiction of Anne Desclos, who wrote her erotic novel, Story of O, as a love letter to critic Jean Paulhan, an admirer of Sade. Mahon explores how Sade influenced the happenings of Jean-Jacques Lebel, the theater of Peter Brook, the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the multimedia art of Paul Chan. She also discusses responses to Sade by feminist theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, and Angela Carter. Beautifully illustrated, The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde demonstrates that Sade inspired generations of artists to imagine new utopian visions of living, push the boundaries of the body and the body politic, and portray the unthinkable in their art.

How the notorious author of The 120 Days of Sodom inspired the surrealists and other avant-garde artists, writers, and filmmakersThe writings of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) present a libertine philosophy of sexual excess and human suffering that refuses to make any concession to law, religion, or public decency. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Alyce Mahon traces how artists of the twentieth century turned to Sade to explore political, sexual, and psychological terror, adapting his imagery of the excessively sexual and terrorized body as a means of liberation from systems of power. Mahon shows how avant-garde artists, writers, dramatists, and filmmakers drew on Sade's "philosophy in the bedroom" to challenge oppressive regimes and their restrictive codes and conventions of gender and sexuality. She provides close analyses of early illustrated editions of Sade's works and looks at drawings, paintings, and photographs by leading surrealists such as André Masson, Leonor Fini, and Man Ray. She explains how Sade's ideas were reflected in the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire and the fiction of Anne Desclos, who wrote her erotic novel, Story of O, as a love letter to critic Jean Paulhan, an admirer of Sade. Mahon explores how Sade influenced the happenings of Jean-Jacques Lebel, the theater of Peter Brook, the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the multimedia art of Paul Chan. She also discusses responses to Sade by feminist theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, and Angela Carter. Beautifully illustrated, The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde demonstrates that Sade inspired generations of artists to imagine new utopian visions of living, push the boundaries of the body and the body politic, and portray the unthinkable in their art.

In Sisterly Affections, London-based artist Sofia Mitsola (b. 1992) constructs a vivid pictorial world where myth, desire, and painting converge on contemporary terms. Her women figures--confident, theatrical, and self-possessed--inhabit spaces that resist fixed narrative or moral framing. Mitsola approaches female eroticism not as spectacle but as agency, informed by classical imagery and reworked through a contemporary feminist lens. Bringing together paintings, drawings, and watercolors, the catalogue is accompanied by a text by Alyce Mahon and an interview by Jennifer Higgie, offering a nuanced portrait of an artist redefining the terms of sensual representation today.