The American, who did not hesitate to openly appear bodies and pleasure, has shown himself several times to censorship. She died on December 26 at the age of 89.
by Philippe Dagen
American artist Dorothy Iannone died in Berlin, Monday, December 26, at the age of 89. In September, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark) ended the latest retrospectives that recently celebrated his work. In highlight was this sentence of her: “A description of myself and a description of my work would hardly be different: the desire for an ecstatic unity, a journey to absolute love.” This desire was realized In his painting.
Born August 9, 1933 in Boston (Massachusetts), she first studied law and literature there, then the arts before graduated from Brandeis University in 1957. After her marriage the following year with the Painter James Upham, the couple settled in New York. Iannone painted in the style of abstract expressionism, then dominant, while performing portraits of famous women and men in xylography.
It is not as an artist, however, that she obtained her first notoriety, but by the trial she brought in 1961 against American customs. During a visit to a New York airport, they seize the copy of the Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller, with which she travels. The book, published in 1934 in Paris, was not in the United States until 1961 and was immediately prosecuted for obscenity. By victoriously bringing the case to court, Iannone contributes to constraining the American authorities to stop attacking the book.
The stake of the trial is the freedom, for a writer, to write on his sexuality without having to go through implications or metaphors, without having to undergo a censorship: explicitly, with frankness, with crudity s ‘it must. What applies to Miller, is soon worth for Iannone.
manifest for freedom
In the second half of the decade, abstract and colorful gesturing gives way to a figuration that allows itself to show everything about female and male anatomies and their erotic relationships, but in a light, fast and lightening style. The drawing simplifies in light lines body, faces, clothes and sexes. All are strongly illuminated, the colors following exactly the sinuosities of the graphics and it is common that words or sentences are registered in capitals, as tattooed on the bodies.
The arrests that read there are as clear as the drawing. This style was brought closer to tantric miniatures, Byzantine icons, Indian paintings and Japanese prints. Comics, pop art, and, even more, Niki de Saint Phalle, Aloïse, Jean Dubuffet and Gaston Chaissac are other probable references, including Iannone, who then travels frequently in Europe and Asia, is as familiar as caves of Ajanta, India, and Egyptian tombs.
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