within this setting that he created this watercolor, either before, during, or after his internment in the Camp des Milles; during this time Wols carried with him his entire visual and written output, distributed across countless scraps of paper, and dreamed—in precisely detailed deliria—of a posthuman world, populated only by insects. TH
Catherine Yarrow (1904–90)
YARROW (541) Amorphic Figure, c. 1935 Etching and aquatint, 17 × 17 cm · Austin Desmond Fine Art
YARROW (542)
Black and Green Faced Figures, 1935 Gouache and watercolor, 46.5 × 33.8 cm · Austin Desmond Fine Art
Two masklike visages—depicted en face, they are utterly without depth—regard the viewer from the picture. Without necks, though apparently quite agile, they stick up above torsos represented in featureless outline. Nestled tightly against each other, the two figures of markedly different size appear before a liquid yellowish- brown backdrop. Their pictographic facial expressions reveal the tenderly erotic bond between them. Catherine Yarrow created the ensemble encompassing this and at least two other similarly minimalistic double portraits in 1935. The date lets us relate the work to a period in the artist’s life during which she sought treatment with C. G. Jung, or perhaps his daughter Gret Baumann- Jung, in Zurich. It is unclear whether the pictures should be seen as directly connected to Yarrow’s psychotherapy. But we may allow ourselves to discern in the silhouetted faces not just an allusion to ritual masks but also an engagement with C. G. Jung’s psychological theory of the persona. Yarrow’s pairs of masks with their rigorously simplified—which is to say, deindividualized— features might be enactments of the fundamental drama of the individual’s relation to the collective. TH
YARROW (543)
Crouching Female, 1935 Watercolor, 35.2 × 32.5 cm · Austin Desmond Fine Art
YARROW (544)
Kneeling Purple Figure (Morges), 1935 Watercolor, 43.8 × 28.9 cm · Austin Desmond Fine Art
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