About this work
Dimanche après-midi (Sunday Afternoon)
1953
Oil on canvas
100 x 65 in.
In her own words...
[Alexander Watt:] ....I was intrigued by the finesse of her compositions. and the subtlety of their colour harmonies, as well as the strange quasi-surrealist,
out-of-this-world imagery that she presents. I asked her if she would explain, in her own words, how she first came to be an artist and what she was aiming to achieve. Here is what she wrote to me:
—from Alexander Watt, "Paris Commentary" (exhibition review), Studio 158, no. 798 (October 1959), p. 92.
out-of-this-world imagery that she presents. I asked her if she would explain, in her own words, how she first came to be an artist and what she was aiming to achieve. Here is what she wrote to me:
I was born and brought up in a little town in Illinois, U.S.A. There wasn't anything there, no mountains, no river, no castle, no slums. In this atmosphere, I learned early to use my imagination and drew and painted a world of my own. By the time I was ten years of age, I knew I would be an artist and live in Paris, France. At twenty years of age I attended art schools in Chicago which disappointed me. I had, no doubt, hoped for something impossible. One day an art dealer saw two of my pictures and said "From now on you're in my gallery". So, you see, I was launched. They were curious metaphysical pictures I made then. The fantastic dreams from my childhood on the great midwestern plain had evolved into something subtle yet urgent, and necessary to me. I watched images appear on the canvas, images I had never seen. Since then my attitude has undergone some changes. I now wish to interrogate the unknown images, to impel them, to make them more real than reality. That's it...to make the imagined world, that began to show itself to me so long ago, the real world, a world that can enrich, that can transform....
