a blind flaneur

Rushdie On Calvino’s Absurd, Charming Masterpiece : NPR: “In 1965, the great Italian writer Italo Calvino — in a light, fantastic collection of 12 short stories, titled Cosmicomics — took on nothing less than the creation of the universe.
“I first read Cosmicomics in my early 20s, and it’s a book I’ve gone back to again […]

Grant Wood. Parson Weem’s’ Fable. 1939. Amon Carter Museum, Forth Worth.
When I was five years old, before I learned to read, I laid claim to a book in the family library called Pictorial History of American Presidents. It covered the course from George to  Ike, who still held office then, and it was loaded with […]

“All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.”
“Had this yearning been for money, rather than revolutionary art,” says the Guardian, André Breton would today have seen his dream realised, on learning that a selection of his personal effects have been sold at auction in Paris for a total of […]

The original manuscript is a priceless fetish object now, but you don’t have to be a zillionaire to read the Manifesto of Surrealism. You can experience a little psychic automatism , and it’s free. Thanks to surrealist.revolution@skymail.fr for publishing this translation in the Creative Commons.
The Manifesto begins:
So strong is the belief in life, in […]

Man Ray. Portrait of Lee Miller. 1930. [Source: Columbia Magazine/Man Ray Trust]

Pablo Picasso. Portrait of Lee Miller as L’Arlesienne. 1937. Musée Picasso, Paris.

Exhibition note for Lee Miller. Picasso in Private at Museu Picasso in Barcelona:
Lee Miller … took over a thousand photographs of Picasso during the thirty-six years of their friendship. The exhibition shows a selection of more than one hundred of these […]

Tom mentioned a Lee Miller profile in this week’s New Yorker. It’s written by Judith Thurman, author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette. The full text isn’t available yet on the New Yorker web site, but here is the abstract:
Judith Thurman, A Critic at Large, “The Roving Eye,” The New Yorker, […]

Reel 1: Jean Cocteau. The Blood of a Poet (trailer).
Lee Miller played the Statue in Jean Cocteau’s Surrealist classic, The Blood of a Poet (Le Sang d’un Poéte). It’s a trippy, enigmatic film laden with “deep” imagery. The original 1930 film moves like molasses compared to the quick cuts in the trailer, which was […]

Lee Miller played the Statue in Jean Cocteau’s 1930 Surrealist film The Blood of a Poet. [Source: Senses of Cinema]
Lee Miller’s first and only movie role was playing the Statue in Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film The Blood of a Poet (Le Sang d’un Poéte). Miller met Cocteau at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a nightclub […]

War correspondent Lee Miller visited Pablo Picasso’s studio on the day Allied troops liberated Paris in August 1944. [Source: Guardian/Lee Miller Archives]
See Lee Miller: Flapper Fashionista, Lee Miller: Surrealist Muse and Lee Miller: War Photographer.