New hero: Lotte Pritzel
trouble4hire got me a book called Still Life: Aventures in Taxidermy by one Melissa Milgrom as a reward for finishing my accounting class. A sort of intellectual dessert to cater to my particular tastes, if you will. In the section on Emily Mayer, the taxidermist responsible for ensuring that no more of Damien Hirst's multi-million-dollar masterpieces fall to bits, we learn that Ms Mayer's maternal grandmother was Lotte Pritzel. I'd never heard of her before, but she's my new idol. She gets one sentence in Milgrom's book: "... a well-known sculptor in 1920s Munich, whose erotically-charged wax dolls inspired the dadaists and the surrealist Hans Bellmer," (ibid. 130). That one sentence was enough to catch my attention.
I love Google:
Some of Ms Pritzel's work is still in existence, and archived (in admittedly rather smallish photos) on Die Puppen der Lotte Pritzel. On the lone English page of the Deutsch website, her work is described as "exotic and androgynous figures." Fair enough.
Almost a hundred years ago now, Pritzel captured everything I could ever hope to do. Her work is so much more delicate and refined than mine; it's a miracle that any of it has survived. No plastics, no synthetics of any kind- everything she did was wax and natural fibres, and yet she acheived an ethereal delicacy that takes my breath away.
I love Google:
Some of Ms Pritzel's work is still in existence, and archived (in admittedly rather smallish photos) on Die Puppen der Lotte Pritzel. On the lone English page of the Deutsch website, her work is described as "exotic and androgynous figures." Fair enough.
Almost a hundred years ago now, Pritzel captured everything I could ever hope to do. Her work is so much more delicate and refined than mine; it's a miracle that any of it has survived. No plastics, no synthetics of any kind- everything she did was wax and natural fibres, and yet she acheived an ethereal delicacy that takes my breath away.