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Leo's Dream

Dreamed c.1979 by Leon Krier, as painted by his friend Rita Wolff

In the 1970s-80s, Rita Wolff painted a series of watercolors of dreams. Thirty or so were published in a book with this grandiose claim:

Although she is self-taught and has only been painting for a dozen years it can be said that Wolff has extended that art by a new category; because unlike the dream-like subjects of surrealism, Wolff creates pictorial records of actual dreams, of her own, of friends and acquaintances.

As if nobody ever painted or drew an actual dream before 1975!

Her real innovation is the high proportion of other people's dreams that Rita illustrated. She wasn't first; Henri Rousseau's famous The Dream was his friend Yadwigha's dream, not his own. But it's rare. Maddeningly, the book undercuts this genuine originality by omitting the "actual dreams" that the paintings illustrate--removing the other half of the collaboration!

As art, her images are atmospheric, but... what you see is all you get.

'Leo's Dream', a watercolor by Rita Wolff.
What do the images mean? That green-gray sea-road, the ruin apparently being re-roofed, the mummy-wrapped face, the marsh wader (or swimmer, or drowner)? We're left floundering.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Rita Wolff: Watercolours, 1974-1985 by Rita Wolff, 1986; St Martin's Press, NY (Plate XVIII). Plate's title is Leo's Dream, but the introduction calls it Leon's Dream, identifying the dreamer as her friend Leon Krier.



LISTS AND LINKS: by the sea - marshes - swimming - construction - masks & disguises - blindness - collaborations - watercolor & gouache - more Rita Wolff - MariNaomi dreams her ex is the Mummy in Jason

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