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phoenixmcarthur
@mmcarthur.bsky.social
3.6K followers 510 following 9.2K posts
Once an artist, always an artist, poetry junkie, wishful potter, voracious reader, lover of Indie and Obscure Rock, Jazz, Classical, Science & always the Resistance. 🧷💪 #ArtHeals
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phoenixmcarthur @mmcarthur.bsky.social · 29d
"We have art so that we shall not die of reality." - Friedrich Nietzsche
mmcarthur.bsky.social
Man Ray (Emmanuel Rudzitsky, 1890-1976) :
Acrobat, 1940-45

Oil on canvas
51.5 x 40.5 cm.

"Painting is directed by the heart through the eye. Photography is directed by the mind through the eye. But desire and love for the subject direct both mediums. One cannot replace the other"

More info 👇
Man Ray had fled war-torn Europe during the summer of 1940, returning to America with just a single suitcase filled with a selection of Rayographs, drawings and watercolours, while the rest of his work remained in Paris. Settling in Hollywood the following year, the artist entered a period of intense creativity as he began to reflect upon his career to date, revisiting and reworking earlier compositions and subjects from his oeuvre. As he explained, it was here in California that he "could now concentrate on the long-range project of re-establishing myself as a painter. There was plenty to do. Besides the reconstruction of apparently lost works, I had sketches and notes for new ones which I hadn’t had time to realise in Paris" (quoted in R. Penrose, Man Ray, London 1975, p. 149). Dating from 1940-1945, "Acrobat" appears to fall into this final category of innovative works, and reveals the direction of Man Ray’s thoughts at the height of his Hollywood years, as he returned to his explorations of pure geometric form as a means of expression. As with many of his abstract compositions of these years, Man Ray takes as his starting point a figurative motif, in this case the architecture of the human figure, seated on a slightly tilting surface, with their knees pulled up towards their chest. Reducing the figure to a series of flat planes, each filled with bright hues of colour, Man Ray explores a complex interplay of 2- and 3-dimensional form, figuration and abstraction, revealing the continued influence of Cubism and Orphism on his painterly vocabulary.
November 11, 2025 at 2:07 PM
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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner :
View of Basel and the Rhine, 1927-28
November 11, 2025 at 6:24 AM
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Franz Kafka : Amerika, 1955

Cover art : Edward Gorey
November 11, 2025 at 6:18 AM
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"As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissist moron." ~ H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
November 11, 2025 at 6:16 AM
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William-Adolphe Bouguereau :
At the Foot of the Cliff, 1886
Detail of head/face and shoulders
November 11, 2025 at 6:06 AM
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Hasui Kawase :
Evening at Ushibori, 1930

Woodblock print;
ink and color on paper
November 11, 2025 at 6:02 AM
mmcarthur.bsky.social
Margaret Keane : Siamese, 1956
November 11, 2025 at 6:00 AM
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Paul Klee : Moonlight, 1919
November 11, 2025 at 6:00 AM
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Marc Chagall :
Blue Horse in the Sky, 1960
November 11, 2025 at 5:59 AM
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Alisa Lariushkina (Vilnius, Lithuania) :
Delicate Slivers of Air-Dry Clay Form Breezy, Idyllic Landscapes, 2022
Lithuanian artist Alisa Lariushkina uses Japanese air-dry clay to create beautiful artworks. Alisa’s artworks reflect upon nature’s sceneries like grasslands, clouds, and oceans, capturing one’s attention in a magical way. In her words about the process of this art works “The process is very meditative and requires perseverance, I mix all the shades of clay with my own hands, then I shape each piece of clay again with my hands and glue it to the canvas and to another piece of clay.” Russian artist Alisa Lariushkina molds countless coiled ribbons and small twists from air-dry clay to create idyllic scenes brimming with color and texture. Reminiscent of Post-Impressionist styles, her sculptural landscapes are imbued with movement, and she uses undulating forms to convey a river’s gleaming surface and a mix of tiny discs to imitate grasses and wildflowers. Lariushkina currently lives in Vilnius and works primarily on commission, and you can follow her latest pieces on Instagram. Pikes Peak
November 11, 2025 at 5:49 AM
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Amedeo Modigliani :
Self Portrait (Autoportrait), 1919

Oil on canvas
100 x 64.5 cm

Museo de Arte de Sao Paulo (MASP), Sao Paulo, Brazil
November 11, 2025 at 5:37 AM
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Oleksandra Ekster (Ukraine 1882–1949) :
Woman with Fish, 1934

Oil on canvas | 93 x 74 cm

Avant-garde artist and set designer

Moscow Museum of Modern Art
November 11, 2025 at 12:23 AM
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Heinrich Campendonk
(German, 1889-1957) :
Pierrot (with Serpent), c.1923

Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld
Weimar Era

Further info in the alt text 👇
Campendonk, steeped in German Expressionism, was deeply interested in the symbolic power of images, drawing from folk art traditions and occultism. Notice how Pierrot, traditionally a figure of melancholic longing, is rendered with green skin and a vibrant red heart on his cheek. That's no mere decorative choice. Green often symbolizes life and rebirth, yet here, juxtaposed with the tragic Pierrot, it suggests a kind of forced joviality or a mask covering deeper anxieties. And that serpent, winding through the scene, isn't necessarily evil, but perhaps represents transformation and the cyclical nature of existence. The church clock tells the truth of our place on Earth, between birth and the apocalypse, and maybe offers a fragile sort of hope amidst this complex personal and symbolic landscape. Consider how these carefully placed images weave a narrative about longing, transformation, and the search for meaning in a tumultuous era. The piece makes more sense knowing those hidden messages. There is such cultural weight tied to this image.
November 10, 2025 at 11:39 PM
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International Jazz Festival -
New Orlean '73

poster
November 10, 2025 at 10:35 PM
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Remembering Robert Frank,
Swiss/American photographer born otd in 1924. 🎂

His best known work is his 1958 book 'The Americans' which gave a gritty insight to the reality of life for many in the US.

Regarded as one of the 20th century's most influential photographers - read more about his life 👇
The Americans is a photographic book by Robert Frank which was highly influential in post-war American photography. It was first published in France in 1958, and the following year in the United States. The photographs were notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society. The book as a whole created a complicated portrait of the period that was viewed as skeptical of contemporary values and evocative of ubiquitous loneliness. "Frank set out with his Guggenheim Grant to do something new and unconstrained by commercial diktats" and made "a now classic photography book in the iconoclastic spirit of the Beats". Frank found a tension in the gloss of American culture and wealth over race and class differences, which gave his photographs a clear contrast to those of most contemporary American photojournalists, as did his use of unusual focus, low lighting and cropping that deviated from accepted photographic techniques. Though sales were poor at first, Kerouac's introduction helped it reach a larger audience because of the popularity of the Beat phenomenon. Over time and through its inspiration of later artists, The Americans became considered a seminal work in American photography and art history, and the work with which Frank is most clearly identified. Sociologist Howard S. Becker has written about The Americans as social analysis: "Robert Frank's (...) enormously influential The Americans is in ways reminiscent both of Tocqueville's analysis of American institutions and of the analysis of cultural themes by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Frank presents photographs made in scattered places around the country, returning again and again to such themes as the flag, the automobile, race, restaurants - eventually turning those artifacts, by the weight of the associations in which he embeds them, into profound and meaningful symbols of American culture."
November 10, 2025 at 3:21 PM
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David Hockney :
Moving Wisp, 1995

on canvas
72.25 x 82.25 in | 183.5 x 208.9 cm

Further description in the alt text 👇
In Moving Wisp, Hockney seeks to exhibit the wide-ranging topography of his adopted California home, bringing tilled fields, meadows of flowers, grassy knolls, peaked mountains, lush soil, and rushing rivers in an abundant halcyon landscape. The organic shapes making up this scene unfurl across the canvas in exquisite panoply of pure color. Golden sun radiates down, saturating the scene in brilliant light; waves of turquoise and indigo undulate against mahogany and ochre fields. Drawing inspiration from Picasso, Hockney collapses traditional single-point perspective, a technique he eschewed because he believed it was meant to keep the viewer outside the picture. By simultaneously featuring various points of view, Hockney creates what is actually a more authentic representation of how we move through and see the world around us. In the artist’s own words: “So ‘how’ we see the world greatly affects ‘what’ we see. No doubt, we have not always been at this level of consciousness…I think now, however, spatial feelings and, therefore, depictions of space, have a great effect on us, a profound effect. It was the growing awareness of this on my part that made me begin to be a little obsessed with ways of depicting space." ~ (David Hockney, That’s the Way I See It, London, 1993, p. 129)
November 10, 2025 at 3:02 PM
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Wilhelmina Barns-Graham :
November I, 1991

Screenprint on paper
55.20 x 64.70 cm

Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art (Modern Two)

Further info in the alt text 👇
This work is the first in a series titled ‘November’ which Barns-Graham made at the Curwen Studio in Linton, near Cambridge. The artist spent 6 days working with Kip Gresham in November, 1991 and this visit marked the artist’s first real engagement with screenprinting. In her diary the artist noted: ‘I was highly nervous and asked to make marks on [a] type of tracing paper. To unwind I asked if I could make ‘a splash’ with black gouache… [which was] done on the ground.’ This work shows the impact of the artist’s trip to Barcelona that October, where she had particularly admired the work of Antoni Tàpies and Joan Miró. ********** Born in St Andrews, Barns-Graham studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1932 to 1937, where she became interested in abstract art. She moved to St Ives in Cornwall in 1940, finding among the modernist artists who had settled there (including Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth) a sympathetic environment for her developing work. A visit to Switzerland in 1948 inspired a series of drawings and paintings of glaciers. Barns-Graham was captivated by the combination of their transparency and rough surfaces. From this time onwards she produced abstract compositions using geometrical forms, but with their origins in nature.
November 10, 2025 at 2:55 PM
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André Kertész (Hungarian) :
Chez Mondrian, Paris, 1926

Gelatin silver print
10.8 × 7.9 cm | 4-5/16 × 3-1/8 in

The Art Institute of Chicago

Further description in the alt text 👇
In 1925, André Kertész moved from his native Hungary to Paris, where he found a community of like-minded artists and writers. Among them was Piet Mondrian, the De Stijl painter who was becoming known for his geometric abstractions. Mondrian invited the young photographer to his studio in early 1926. As Kertész recalled years later: “I went to his studio and instinctively tried to capture in my photographs the spirit of his paintings. He simplified, simplified, simplified. The studio with its symmetry dictated the composition. He had a vase with a flower, but the flower was artificial. It was colored by him with the right color to match the studio.” Although Mondrian imposed rigid geometric order on everything in the apartment, Kertész found deviations in the curves of the staircase, vase, and the round boater hat hanging on the rack. (The hat belonged to the photographer’s friend Michel Seuphor, a painter and writer who authored a book on Mondrian, who had accompanied Kertész to the studio.) This photograph has become one of Kertész’s most famous, although it was not published until 1943. It was known previously only through exhibitions, including Kertész’s first exhibition in 1927 at the Parisian gallery Au Sacre du Printemps.
November 10, 2025 at 2:48 PM
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Hannah Höch :
Der Berg (The Mountain), 1939

Oil on canvas, 75.3 x 70.5 cm

Further descriptions in both alt texts 👇
This enigmatic work emerged during a period of deep turmoil and angst in Hannah Höch’s life. For much of the decade, she had been unable to show her work publicly in Germany due to the restrictive cultural policies of the National Socialist party, and in 1937 she was among the group of avant-garde artists vilified as ‘cultural bolshevists’ in Wolfgang Willrich’s publication Säuberung des Kunsttempels (The Cleansing of the Temple of Art), which would provide the framework for the notorious Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition later that year. To avoid persecution during the Third Reich, Höch moved from central Berlin to the quiet rural suburb of Heiligensee, where her past artistic affiliations remained unknown to her neighbours. Here, Höch entered a period of artistic and social isolation, keeping her rich archive of DADA ephemera and artworks hidden in her house, all the while continuing to paint and create photomontages under the radar of the authorities. ‘I often wonder how I managed to survive that dreadful reign of terror,’ she later said. ‘When I now look back, I’m surprised by my own courage or irresponsibility in preserving in my home all the “subversive” Dada art and literature… But it never occurred to me, until it was all over, that I could still be considered a dangerous revolutionary…" It was during this period of tension, uncertainty and fear that she fully embraced the Surrealist idiom in her painting, discovering in it a path to artistic freedom amid the ‘nightmarish’ atmosphere of the ‘illusory world of National Socialism’. Höch examines the universal, timeless theme of the cycle of life through the metaphor of a mountain hike. Several figures are seen at different stages of climbing the steep, stark mountain, their slender, simple forms appearing almost doll-like in their anonymity. While some take the clearly delineated path, traversing the mountainside along an established, predetermined route, others look for more direct shortcuts to the top, such as the figure clinging to the cliff-face. At the summit, a lone figure stands tall, their body basking in the bright sunlight of the distant star that hangs in the sky, while to the right, a stream of figures are seen descending from the peak, heading towards a dark cave in the mountainside, where they will disappear. Höch signifies the different ages of her humanoid characters through a nuanced treatment of body language and pose – while the figures on the left of the composition seem filled with youthful vigour and energy, boldly racing through the initial stages of the climb, the characters descending the shadowy slope and entering the cave are hunched over, their movements slow and careful as they navigate the treacherous path. This progression of time and life is echoed in the foreground of the painting, where three botanical elements are clustered together, their forms illustrating different stages of their lifecycle, from the lush beauty of the bright red flower in full bloom, to the pale blue leaves of a plant on the brink of withering, and the bare, lifeless tree at the centre, completely uprooted from the soil and ready to be discarded. While the doll-like figures and rock formations of the mountain, reminiscent of wrinkled leather, also appear in Höch’s cover designs for Victor Witte’s 1938 adventure novel Der Berg Lichtes, in Der Berg the artist explores profound questions about humanity and the journey of life, at a time when the chaos and turmoil of German politics and the impending war placed such certainties in peril.
November 10, 2025 at 2:41 PM
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I just want to go back to Carlsbad (where my mom lived) and sit on the beach...

and stay there.
November 10, 2025 at 2:23 PM
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John Cale & Patti Smith at Electric Lady Studios, 1975, just finished recording Horses, otd 50 years ago. 🎂

📸 : Robert Mapplethorpe
November 10, 2025 at 2:20 PM
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Ekua Holmes (b.1955) :
Sufficient Grace - Ms. Ivy Beckles, 2009

Collage of found and painted papers on canvas.⁠

Awards: Caldecott Medal

Ekua Holmes share.google/WHAzM3UyfJKT...

Bio in the alt text 👇
⁠
Mixed-media collage artist, children's book illustrator, and arts organization professional. Her primary method is layering newspaper, photos, fabric, and other materials to create colorful compositions. As a young artist, Holmes discovered the power of found objects, which derive their identity as art from places as well as the social histories attached to the objects. She uses found newspapers, magazines, old stamps, and so on. She often creates patterns using these materials. Childhood, family bonds, memory, and resilience are frequent themes in her work. Many of Holmes's collages are reminiscent of works by African and African American artists such as the late Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Njideka Akunyili. Like these artists, her works reflect a commitment to Black imagery and representation. About her work, Holmes said, “In everything I create I hear them saying, ‘Remember Me,’ and through my work I honor their legacies by bringing them forward to life with torn and cut shapes of found colors and textures. With these scraps and remnants, assembled like a down-home quilt, I rebuild my world, putting in what speaks to my personal and cultural narrative.” Google Doodle On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2015, Holmes's Google Doodle illustration honoring the civil rights leader was the featured image on Google's U.S. homepage. The collage depicts King walking arm in arm with fellow activists in Selma, Alabama. Holmes founded The Great Black Art Collection, an organization dedicated to both giving a platform to emerging artists and to introducing Black art to previously unreached audiences. Holmes is currently Vice-Chair of the Boston Arts Commission. Holmes is also currently working in Boston as an assistant director at the Center for Art and Community Partnerships at MassArt. There, she manages sparc! the ArtMobile. Awards: Caldecott Medal Ekua Holmes https://share.google/WHAzM3UyfJKT5ECLf
November 10, 2025 at 2:12 PM
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Henryk Płóciennik (Poland, 1933–2020) :
Blue Garden, 1973

Oil on Canvas
November 10, 2025 at 2:00 PM
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Pierre Mignard :
The Marquise de Seignelay
and Two of her Sons, 1691

oil on canvas | 194.5 × 154.4 cm
In this portrait, the recently widowed Catherine-Thérèse, Marquise de Seignelay (1662–1699) and two of her five sons are shown as characters from Greek and Roman mythology. The Marquise is probably meant to be the sea goddess Thetis, but could also be interpreted as Venus, the goddess of love, with her attributes: a scallop shell and strings of pearls. Her sons are painted as Cupid, god of love, and Achilles, a Greek hero of the Trojan War. The children gaze towards a small portrait cameo, which could be of their father, alluding to his death. For Catherine-Thérèse’s sumptuous robe, Mignard used an expensive, high-quality ultramarine blue pigment as a show of her wealth and power. The figures are surrounded by sea and different kinds of shells, references to her husband’s profession in the French royal navy. A volcano smokes in the background.
November 9, 2025 at 8:14 PM
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I've heard some people say "taste can be taught." 🤔 Umm, no. Taste cannot be taught. The basics of aesthetics can be taught, but definitely not taste.
November 9, 2025 at 7:23 PM