Mary Ann Caws

Mary Ann Caws’s new translations of Alice Paalen Rahon’s poetry will be published later this year.

Picassomania: Roland Penrose’s notebooks

Mary Ann Caws, 19 October 2006

A lot of the stories, truthful or otherwise, about Picasso are as colourful as they are improbable. Picasso liked the mystery, was eager for no one to be sure what he would do next. Told that Joanna Drew, a curator at the Hayward Gallery, had found cocoons huddled in the slits of his Man with a Sheep, Picasso said that at Vauvenargues one day he had felt a wasps’ nest between the...

This engrossing book sets out to claim something for its subject that no other English-language publication has even thought of. I do not believe that any among those of us who have written on Surrealism in general and on Robert Desnos in particular, admiring though we are of this poet who was the first to perform automatic sleep speaking (and always outperformed anyone and everyone at it)...

I, too, am an artist: Dora Maar

Linda Nochlin, 4 January 2001

Dora Maar’s ‘Sky and Mountain’, undated, but executed in the late 1950s or the 1960s. Most people, if they think of Dora Maar at all, remember her as the subject of one of...

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My grandmother was the painter Vanessa Bell. She died aged 81 when I was eight. I loved my grandmother, but 39 years later I have few memories of her. If, that is, a ‘memory’ is some...

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