Albert Tucker In the Mirror: Self Portrait with Joy Hester 1939 gelatin silver print Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Australia |
Albert Tucker Australia-Soviet Friendship League Parade, Melbourne ca. 1941 gelatin silver print Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Australia |
Albert Tucker Studio Interior 1943 gelatin silver print Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Australia |
Albert Tucker Self Portrait 1940 gelatin silver print Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Australia |
Paolo Veronese Portrait of architect Vincenzo Scamozzi ca. 1585 oil on canvas Denver Art Museum |
Paolo Veronese Portrait of a Woman as St Agnes ca. 1580-90 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
Paolo Veronese St Barnabas healing the Sick ca. 1566 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen |
Paolo Veronese The Finding of Moses ca. 1570-80 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon |
James Tissot October 1878 etching and drypoint Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto |
James Tissot Promenade dans la Neige (Tissot's mistress Kathleen Newton) 1880 etching and drypoint Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
James Tissot The Widower 1876 oil on canvas Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney |
James Tissot The Convalescent 1872 oil on panel Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto |
Anthony van Dyck Portrait of Maria de Tassis ca. 1629-30 oil on canvas Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna |
Anthony van Dyck Mary Villiers, Lady Herbert of Shurland ca. 1636 oil on canvas Timken Museum of Art, San Diego |
Anthony van Dyck Entry of Christ into Jerusalem ca. 1617 oil on canvas Indianapolis Museum of Art |
Anthony van Dyck Drunken Silenus ca. 1619-20 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden |
from Part Six of The Age of Anxiety
Quant had now reached the house where he lived and, as he started to climb the steps of his stoop, he tripped and almost fell. At which he said:
Why, Miss ME, what's the matter? Must you go woolgathering?
Once I was your wonder. How short-winded you've gotten.
Come, Tinklebell, trot. Let's pretend you're a thoroughbred.
Over the hill now into Abraham's Bosom.
So saying, he opened his front door and disappeared. But Malin's journey was still not done. He was thinking:
For the new locus is never
Hidden inside the old one
Where Reason could rout it out,
Nor guarded by dragons in distant
Mountains where Imagination
Could explore it; the place of birth
Is too obvious and near to notice,
Some dull dogpatch a stone's throw
Outside the walls, reserved
For the eyes of faith to find.
Now, the train came out onto the Manhattan Bridge. The sun had risen. The East River glittered. It would be a bright clear day for work and for war. Malin thought:
For the others, like me, there is only the flash
Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one
Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass
To meet one's madness, when what mother said seems
Such darling rubbish and the decent advice
Of the liberal weeklies as lost an art
As peasant pottery, for plainly it is not
To the Cross or to Clarté or to Common Sense
Our passions pray but to primitive totems
As absurd as they are savage; science or no science,
It is Bacchus or the Great Boyg or Baal-Peor,
Fortune's Ferris-wheel or the physical sound
Of our own names which they actually adore as their
Ground and goal. Yet the grossest of our dreams is
No worse than our worship which for the most part
Is so much galimatias to get out of
Knowing our neighbor, all the needs and conceits of
The poor muddled maddened mundane animal
Who is hostess to us all, for each contributes his
Personal panic, his predatory note
To her gregarious grunt as she gropes in the dark
For her lost lollypop.
– W.H. Auden (1944-46)