
CLOSE-UP: DEEP FAKE
“Dora Maar” was slated to travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles on April 21. It has been postponed due to COVID-19.
WHEN APPROACHING A CONCAVE MIRROR, we initially see ourselves unsettlingly upside down. But there is a threshold at which the image momentarily disappears, only to reemerge, the world righted. What is the artistic equivalent of this phenomenon? Consider Dora Maar’s Le simulateur (The Pretender), 1935, a beguiling picture.* A figure bends improbably, his back arched away from a curved wall at the inflection point where the stone half-pipe floor snakes around the corner.