Monday, April 8, 2024

Modern Heads - I

Émile-Antoine Bourdelle
Head of Apollo
1900
bronze
Art Institute of Chicago

Constantin Brâncusi
Danaїde
ca. 1918
bronze
Tate Gallery

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound
1914
drawing
(study for sculpture)
Yale University Art Gallery

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound
1914
marble
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Gustaw Gwozdecki
Head
1915
drawing
Yale University Art Gallery

Alexei von Jawlensky
Head of an Angel
1917-18
oil on cardboard
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena

The Artist's Model, ca. 1912

In 1886 I came apart –

I who had been Mme. Rivière, 
whole under flowing silk, 
had sat on the grass, naked,
my body an unbroken invitation –

splintered into thousands
of particles, a bright rock
blasted to smithereens;
even my orange skirt dissolved
into drops that were not orange.

Now they are stacking me like a child's
red and blue building blocks,
splitting me down the middle,
blackening half my face;

they tell me the world has changed,
haven't I heard, and give me
a third eye, a rooster's beak.

I ask for my singular name
back, but they say in the future 
only my parts will be known,
a gigantic pair of lips,
a nipple, slick as candy,

and that even those will disappear,
white on white or black on black,
and you will look for me
in the air, in the absence of figure,
in space, inside your head,
where I started, your own work of art.

– Lisel Mueller (1978)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Head of Dr Robert Binswanger
ca. 1917-18
woodcut
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Wyndham Lewis
Head of Antony
(Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra)
ca. 1910
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Amedeo Modigliani
Portrait of Léon Indenbaum
1916
oil on canvas
Princeton University Art Museum

Edvard Munch
Head by Head
1905
color woodblock print
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

Elie Nadelman
Classical Head with Headdress
1908-1909
marble
Milwaukee Art Museum

Max Pechstein
Eibedul
1917
hand-colored woodcut
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Pablo Picasso
Study for Head of Nude with Drapery
1907
watercolor and gouache on paper
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Head of a Woman
1915
woodcut
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
(Achenbach Foundation)

Hermann Stemmler
Head of a Woman
ca. 1916
watercolor
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

John Bradley Storrs
Head
1917
linocut
(proof sheet for exhibition catalogue cover)
Yale University Art Gallery

The Singers

They are not angels

though they have the hollow look

         of beings bred on ether. There's an air

of cool removal from your life, the hawk's

         indifference to the hare's terror.

You see it in their palms, raised casually

         against the fresco's surface, as to glass

of submarine or spacecraft, and you see

         it in their eyes, oracular, that let you pass

alone to unknown agony. The song 

         they sing is merely time.

– Todd Hearon (2005)