Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Incomplete Figures

Roman Empire
Emperor Commodus
as the Infant Hercules strangling Serpents

AD 183-192
marble
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Kingdom of Gandhara
Figure of Mourner
2nd-3rd century AD
schist
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Francesco Salviati
Allegorical Figure of Victory
ca. 1550-55
drawing
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Anonymous Artist
Psyche
(copy of antique fragment)
18th century
marble
National Trust, Castle Ward,
Downpatrick, Northern Ireland

Reidel Glass Works
Venus
ca. 1900
pressed glass
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Raymond Duchamp-Villon
Torso of Young Man
1910
plaster
Art Institute of Chicago

Alexander Archipenko
Reclining Torso
1922
glazed ceramic
Art Institute of Chicago

Gerhard Henning
Female Torso
1923
terracotta
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Leon Golub
Figure
1958
lacquer on linen
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden

Joan Eardley
Study of a Child in Jumper and Shorts
ca. 1960
drawing (colored chalks)
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Francesca Woodman
Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island
ca. 1975-78
gelatin silver print
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

R.B. Kitaj
Actor (Richard)
1979
drawing (colored chalks)
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art,
Edinburgh

Magdalena Abakanowicz
Standing Figure
1981
burlap, resin and sand
Denver Art Museum

Maria Kuczynska
Samurai
1986
stoneware
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Georg Baselitz
Torso
1989
drawing (colored chalks)
Kupferstichkabinett, Kunstmuseum, Basel

Tip Toland
The Whistlers
2005
painted stoneware
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

from The Atlantic

                                  Unravelled now
And the shore, under its lucid pane,
    Clear to the sight, it is spent:
The sun rocks there, as the netted ripple
    Into whose skeins the motion threads it
Glances athwart a bed, honey-combed
    By heaving stones. Neither survives the instant
But is caught back, and leaves, like the after-image
    Released from the floor of a now different mind . . .

– Charles Tomlinson (1960)