Mixed Thirties

Minna Citron
She Earns an Honest Living
1934
oil on panel
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, New York

Hans Bellmer
La Poupée
ca. 1934
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

James Abbe
Dr Goebbels
ca. 1933
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Ilya Bolotowsky
Cobalt Green
1939
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Muirhead Bone
Church Interior
ca. 1930
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Ilse Bing
Balcony View, Paris
1931
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Henri Clemens
Kabyle Village
ca. 1930
oil on canvas
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Narbonne

Joseph Cornell
Défense d’Afficher
1939
assemblage (wood, glass, printed paper, found objects)
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Sergey Chekhonin
Portrait of a Girl
ca. 1932
watercolor on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Hyde Park, London
1938
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Stella Bowen
Embankment Gardens
ca. 1938
oil on board
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Brassaï
At Suzy's
ca. 1932-33
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Rudy Burckhardt
Times Square
ca. 1938
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Leonora Carrington
Portrait of Max Ernst
ca. 1939
oil on canvas
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Milton Bellin
Two Women
ca. 1935
oil on canvas
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Berenice Abbott
New York
ca. 1932
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Peter Blume
Light of the World
1932
oil on board
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

    Many have studied to exasperate the ways of death, but few hours have been spent to soften the last necessity.  That the smoothest way unto the grave is made by Bleeding, as common opinion presumeth, the experiment in Lucan and Seneca will make us doubt, under which the noble Stoick so deeply laboured that he was fayne to retire from the sight of his wife to conceal the affliction thereof: and was not ashamed to implore the merciful hand of his physician to shorten his misery therein.  Nor will they readily be of that belief who behold the sick and fainting Languors which accompany the effusion of blood when it proceedeth unto death.

    Ovid, the old Heroes, and the Stoicks who were so afrayd of drowning, as dreading thereby the extinction of their Soules, which they conceived to be fire, stood surely in fear of an easier way of death wherein the water entering the possessions of air makes a temperate suffocation, and kills as it were without a fever.  

    Surely many who have had the spirit to destroy themselves have not been ingenious in the contrivance.  Twas a dull way practised by Themistocles to overwhelm himself with Bull's blood, who being an Athenian might have held an easier Theorie of death from the authentick and state potion of his country, from which Socrates seemed not to suffer more than from the fitt of an Ague.  Cato is much to be pitied who mangled himself with poyniards; and Hannibal seems more subtle, who carved his deliverie, not in the poynt but the pummel of his sword (wherein he is said to have carried a something that might upon a straight despatch and deliver him from all misfortunes).  

    The Aegyptians were merciful contrivers, who destroyed their malefactors by Aspes, charming their senses unto an irrecoverable sleep, and killing as it were with Hermes his rod.  The Turkish Emperour odious for other crueltie was herein a remarkable master of mercy, killing his favourite in his sleepe and sending him from the shade into the howse of darknesse.  He that had been thus destroyed, would hardly have bled at the presence of his destroyer, where men are already dead by metaphor, and pass but from one sleep unto another, wanting herein the eminent part of severitie to be made to feel themselves die, and escaping the sharpest attendant of death, the lively apprehension thereof. 

– Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)