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| Marsden Hartley Down East Young Blades ca. 1940 oil on masonite Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Charles Sheeler Fugue 1940 tempera on masonite Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Dick Romyn The Angel of Death, 1939-1945 1946 tempera on canvas National Army Museum, London |
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| Arthur Dove Untitled (Landscape with White Rectangle) 1942-44 tempera on paper Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
The Painter
Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea's portrait
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.
So there was never any paint on his canvas
Until the people who lived in the buildings
Put him to work: "Try using the brush
As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,
Something less angry and large, and more subject
To a painter's moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer."
How could he explain to them his prayer
That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?
He chose his wife for a new subject,
Making her vast, like ruined buildings,
As if, forgetting itself, the portrait
Had expressed itself without a brush.
Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush
In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:
"My soul, when I paint this next portrait
Let it be you who wrecks the canvas."
The news spread like wildfire through the buildings:
He had gone back to the sea for his subject.
Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
Too exhausted even to lift his brush,
He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings
To malicious mirth: "We haven't a prayer
Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,
Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!"
Others declared it a self-portrait.
Finally all indications of a subject
Began to fade, leaving the canvas
Perfectly white. He put down the brush.
At once a howl, that was also a prayer,
Arose from the overcrowded buildings.
They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;
And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush
As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.
– John Ashbery (written in 1948, published in Some Trees, Yale University Press, 1956)
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| Robert Motherwell Line Figure in Beige and Mauve 1946 oil on board Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Ellen Lanyon Elevated Night 1947 tempera on board Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Jackie Kirk Untitled (Black Figure in a Turbulent Landscape) ca. 1945 tempera on paper Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Achenbach Foundation) |
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| Robert Gates Winter Sun 1949 tempera on canvas Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
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| Kenneth Callahan Journey on a Star 1947 oil paint and tempera on paper, mounted on cardboard Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
Some Trees
These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges
A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
– John Ashbery (written in 1948, published in Some Trees, Yale University Press, 1956)
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| Reginald Marsh Coney Island Beach 1947 tempera on masonite Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Mark Rothko Untitled 1949 oil on canvas Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Mark Rothko Untitled ca. 1944 watercolor and tempera on paper Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Mark Rothko Untitled 1940 watercolor and tempera on paper Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
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| Jared French Double Heads 1941 tempera on board Philadelphia Museum of Art |