A secondhand book found in Paris takes Elodie Rose Barnes on a curious foray into the fantastical Studio Manassé, a portraiture business that specialised in glamorously surreal and, at times, problematic photographs of women.
After an Erasmus exchange in Paris, artist and art historian Kathryn Cutler-MacKenzie discovered that translation is about the space between languages and voices; a space that affords us new connections, ideas and friendships.
In her third chapter of the series, Elodie Rose Barnes walks the streets of Paris trying to uncover fragments of Djuna Barnes’ relationship with Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and her attempt to write a biography of the Dada artist’s life.
In Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926, Lottie Whalen sees both an insouciant New Woman and Dix’s embodiment of a dangerously dissolute era. Recalling a recent encounter with the painting in Paris, she reflects on the freedoms we stand to lose in the time of Covid-19.
Throughout history Eurydice has been portrayed as a voiceless cypher next to the vocal brilliance of her husband Orpheus. But does the ENO’s 2019 programme of Gluck, Offenbach and Glass alter this? asks our writer Miriam Al Jamil.
