Celestial Eyes | |
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Artist | Francis Cugat |
Year | 1924 |
Medium | Oil on canvas |
Movement | Art Deco |
Location | Princeton University, Princeton |
Celestial Eyes is a painting painted in 1924 by Spanish painter Francis Cugat and preserved at the Princeton University Library for the Grafic Arts Collection.[1][2]
The Art Deco style work is the cover of Francis Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, set in the 1920s Jazz Age and considered one of the most representative novels of American literature.[3]
The work depicts a female face of a flapper with poorly delineated contours, of which are seen only the eyes and mouth, suspended above the night sky of a city, evoking the Coney Island amusement park in New York. Inside the irises there are female nude figures and a green tint in correspondence of the left eye resembling a tear.[4]
The iconic motif of the cover is given by its abstractness that gives it a mysterious charm and that is why it has met with many strongly conflicting opinions.[5]
In addition, her ill-defined characters have prompted readers and critics to wonder what she may have been inspired by, with the main hypotheses pinning on Dr. Eckleburg's billboard in the Valley of Ashes or the description of Daisy, loved by the protagonist Jay Gatsby in the novel.[6]
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