Eddie (Sylvie's Brother) in the Desert

In the early 1960s Öyvind Fahlström began to make what he termed “variable” paintings, in which a figure’s limbs or other discrete shapes were segmented and jointed—and thus movable. The potential mobility of these elements was, for Fahlström, a way of implicating the viewer. In his words, “strategy, manipulation, [and] political psychodrama” are central to art’s content.

Eddie (Sylvie’s Brother) in the Desert is crowded with vivid, active, yet enigmatic imagery—a window shattering, a flag fluttering, a nude woman running, a suited man bounding out of the frame, and cartoonish trails of rushing air. The title references Sylvie Vartan, a French pop singer of the day, and her brother, Eddie, a musician as well, for whom Fahlström imagined a densely populated, disorienting “desert.”