{"id":15804,"date":"2026-10-06T00:01:22","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T04:01:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/?p=15804"},"modified":"2026-10-05T14:58:03","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T18:58:03","slug":"maria-martins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/maria-martins\/","title":{"rendered":"Maria Martins"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is Maria Martins\u2019s *The Impossible, III* (1946), a bronze in MoMA\u2019s collection, currently on view on the fifth floor in gallery 500. It is about 31\u00bd by 32\u00bd by 21 inches.
Martins (born Maria de Lourdes Alves, 1894\u20131973) was a Brazilian sculptor. She grew up in Campanha, studied music, then took up sculpture while living abroad with her husband, the diplomat Carlos Martins Pereira e Sousa. In New York in the 1940s she learned bronze casting from Jacques Lipchitz, showed with the Surrealists, and was taken up by Andr\u00e9 Breton, who linked her writhing, plantlike forms to Amazonian myth. She bought Mondrian\u2019s *Broadway Boogie Woogie* and later gave it to MoMA.
She made several versions of this sculpture between 1944 and 1949, in different sizes and materials. MoMA\u2019s label quotes her directly: \u201cIt is nearly impossible to make people understand each other.\u201d The fuller remark she used for the work was \u201cThe world is complicated and sad\u2014it is nearly impossible to make people understand each other.\u201d
The two figures are usually read as male and female. Their bodies touch and lean into one another, but the spikes that erupt from their heads stop short of meeting. MoMA describes that as an embrace that is both opposition and attraction \u2014 desire and refusal at once. A *Time* reviewer, seeing a plaster version in 1946, said it looked like \u201ca disagreement between two anthropomorphic snowstorms.\u201d
Later writers have also tied the title to her affair with Marcel Duchamp, which began around the year she made this piece. She was married to the Brazilian ambassador and had no intention of divorcing; Duchamp later used her as the model for the nude in *\u00c9tant donn\u00e9s*. That reading is interpretive. What she herself said the sculpture was about is the near-impossibility of two people actually understanding each other.–Grok<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I heard from Anuj Agarwal, the Creators Account Manager and Founder of FeedSpot letting me know that the Black and White blog was selected by FeedSpot as one of the Top 10 Black and White Photography Blogs<\/a> on the web (2026 Edition).
\nThe Internet has evolved since B&W was started in 1996. I am not a fan of social media where we are all the product. I deeply appreciate Feedspot’s recognition and encourage all to view websites maintained by people who don’t collect and sell your information. Thanks Anuj!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I heard from Anuj Agarwal, the Creators Account Manager and Founder of FeedSpot letting me know that the Black and White blog was selected by FeedSpot as one of the Top 10 Black and White Photography Blogs on the web (2026 Edition). The Internet has evolved since B&W was started in 1996. I am not … Continue reading “Maria Martins”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[69,46,31,67,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-city","category-dolls","category-public-space","category-strange-land"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15804"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15804"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15807,"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15804\/revisions\/15807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billemory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}