"INVENTION OF THE LABYRINTH"
ANDRÉ MASSON // 1942
[ink on colored paper | 23 1/8 x 18 1/4"]
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Georgiana Houghton
Flower of Samuel Warrand, 1862.
Samuel Warrand was Georgiana Houghton’s deceased uncle and her mother’s brother. Houghton claimed the drawing had been guided by the spirit of Henry Lenny, who had been a deaf and mute artist in life. Lenny also dictated a long letter explaining the drawing.
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Morning Star (Blessed Are the Pure in Heart, for They Shall See God)
by Well Wxlston
Ink on bristol, 11 x 14 in.
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Austin Osman Spare. The focus of life.
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Just a collage based on last year's painting
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"AUTOMATIC DRAWING"
ANDRÉ MASSON | PARIS, 1924
[ink on paper | 9 1/4 x 8 1/8"]
André Masson began automatic drawings with no preconceived subject or composition in mind. Like a medium channeling a spirit, he let his pen travel rapidly across the paper without conscious control. He soon found hints of images—fragmented bodies and objects—emerging from the abstract, lacelike web of pen marks. At times Masson elaborated on these with conscious changes or additions, but he left the traces of the rapidly drawn ink mostly intact.
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Georgiana Houghton, Eye of the Lord, 1870.
Georgiana Houghton’s only major showing of her drawings in her lifetime was not a success. It was an elaborate affair at the New British Gallery in London organized at her own expense, but of the 155 pieces produced over a ten-year period, she sold only one. Nor was the critical reception particularly warm. According to a recent account, “most of the critics were surprised and alienated, dismissive, malicious, or amused”
Despite this disappointment, today there is a growing recognition that Houghton’s art is quite beautiful and worthy of our attention and that she and not the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) may have been the first to introduce works that were not tied to recognizable objects—abstract art. For decades, art historians have placed the beginning of abstract art at 1910 when Kandinsky produced his first nonrepresentational works, but Houghton’s exhibition of abstract drawings was held forty years earlier in 1871. Furthermore, the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint began painting beautiful abstract works beginning in 1906, four years before Kandinsky. Given the many challenges faced by women artists well into the twentieth century, it seems likely that sexism played a role in the telling of this story.
vis theskepticalinquirer
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Well of The Living One Who Sees Me by Well Wxlston
November 2021
Ink on paper, 9 x 12 in.
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Some drawings from my Energy Sketch series, refining the shapes and structures that come from practising automatic drawing.
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