Lucy Ives

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  print February 2022

  MYTHIC BEING

  Rare are they who are up to the task of freeing love from caricature.
  —Annie Le Brun
  

  FOR FIVE YEARS, Toyen’s dear friend Jindřich Heisler hid from the Nazis in the artist’s bathroom. There—perhaps also venturing from time to time into Toyen’s neighboring studio—Heisler developed some of the most remarkable experimental photographic techniques of the twentieth century, capturing painstaking miniature dioramas and deploying photomontage to highly original ends. He converted everyday objects and common substances into rich, strange forms, toying with scale and unexpected juxtapositions. One of his

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  print November 2021

  CLOSE-UP: WOMAN IS THE HOST

  NO LESSER EMINENCE than Carl Jung declared her sane. “She seems to have learned a lot from her clash with the elves,” he wrote in a 1935 letter to Meret Oppenheim’s father. This father, himself a medical man, had to be contented. Although he had heard that his twenty-two-year-old daughter had posed nude “for those certain magazines (with whores),” he did not force her to quit Paris for the relative backwater of Basel. Hitler’s rise would be enough to accomplish that. Anti-Jewish laws soon made it impossible for Erich Alfons Oppenheim to practice, and he could no longer send rent money. The sale,

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  print November 2015

  Raymond Roussel

  Difficult author; reclusive aesthete; visionary fabricator of fantastic objects literary, conceptual, and material: The reputation of Raymond Roussel (1877–1933) often precedes him. In photographs he is a pale, impeccably groomed man with a resplendent mustache. A shy smile pairs oddly with the wild energy in his gaze. His writings, allegedly incomprehensible to all but the most committed appreciators of his day, still receive less attention than his biography or, perhaps more accurately, his legend.

  Galerie Buchholz’s recent exhibition was the latest view into the Roussel annals. It also functioned