naked before
an alien gaze
she bathed and
slowly
and surely
she drew her plans
against empires
of steel and
pain
This collage combines Lawren Harris' Icebergs, Davis Strait (1930) and Degas' Tub (1886) with Henrique Alvim Corrêa's illustration for H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898).
The story
Three artists who never met meet here.
The ice is from Lawren Harris's Icebergs, Davis Strait (1930), painted after the Arctic voyage he made that summer aboard the supply ship Beothic with A. Y. Jackson.
The woman is from Edgar Degas's The Tub, a pastel of 1886 shown that year at the last of the Impressionist exhibitions and now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. It is one of a series of pastels Degas made in the mid-1880s of women washing and drying themselves.
And rising behind her is a Martian fighting machine from the Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa (1876–1910). He asked H. G. Wells for permission to illustrate The War of the Worlds and made 132 drawings for it. Wells approved, and judged them better than the English illustrator Warwick Goble's. They were published in a limited edition of 500 copies in Brussels in 1906. Corrêa died of tuberculosis four years later, at thirty-four.