Tilda Swinton & Lady Amanda Harlech In 'The Surreal World' By Tim Walker For W Magazine December 2014

“Tilda Swinton mingles with the Max Ernsts at the Houston home and museum of legendary patrons Dominique and John de Menil,” writes the December issue of W Magazine. The Tim Walker shoot — with Lady Amanda Harlech and Lynn Wyatt joining the party — celebrates the 30th anniversary of Dominique de Menil’s 1984 exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. The event was the first one to showcase more than 600 works ranging from a paleolithic bone carving dating from 22,000–15,000 BC to 20th-century masterpieces by Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Georges Braque.

Jacob K styles Swinton in a painted metal corset by London designer Johanna O’Hagan, paired with black boots by Versace, for a fashion moment that channels a key event in the history of Surrealism. W continues:

In 1923, Max Ernst painted a full-length female nude with a large white bird at her crotch, titled La Belle Jardinière.In 1937, the work was confiscated by the Nazis and featured in the notorious exhibition “Degenerate Art.” (There is a photograph of Adolf Hitler looking upon the painting disapprovingly.) The original was never seen again and is assumed to have been destroyed, but Ernst painted a second version in 1967 called Retour de la Belle Jardinière, which the de Menils, close friends of the artist and ardent collectors of his work, bought. “This is the special magic of these collaborations,” Swinton says as she poses as the gardener. “There is not just a vaguereferencing of de Menil but also an immersion into her world. We’re crossing into a no-man’s-land between history and imagination, in an attempt to evoke her spirit, and the spirit of the world she inhabited.”