JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post    Part of the Accidental Absurdist series

Marisu de Zayas  had a little fun with the origins of Cubism, producing this satire in 1914 during the first decade of the new movement’s existence. He has a group of Suffragists (still five years away from the vote at this point) transform Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp with the tools of the trade of the folks in the painting:

Its not as though de Zayas was anti-Cubist or a traditionalist or a morality figure or a cow-in-the-field artist–hardly.  He was a modernist with a sense of humor, though I am sure that there were millions of people who agreed with a literal interpretation of his satire. Perhaps his name is a little misty at this point, but his artistic contributions are not–here’s his cover for the very first issue of Alfred Stieglitz’s 291:

This was the Little Magazine born of Stieglitz’s pioneering art gallery of the same name, which held the first exhibition in the U.S. for the works of Matisse (1908) and the first American one-person shows of Cezanne and Picasso (both in 1911) and championed the work of modernists like Duchamp, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Max Weber, Clarence White,  Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi, Francis Picabia, Henri Rousseau, and, well, the list goes on and on. (And de Zayas.)