Thursday, April 17, 2025

Artists (Appearance)

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Annette and Alberto Giacometti, Paris
1958
gelatin silver print
Museum Folkwang, Essen

Hugo Erfurth
Portrait of sculptor Renée Sintenis
1929
gelatin silver print
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Herbert List
Pablo Picasso with Tête de Mort, Paris
1944
gelatin silver print
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

August Sander
Jankel Adler (artist)
1924
gelatin silver print
Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal

August Sander
Postmortem Portrait of artist Franz Wilhelm Seiwert
1933
gelatin silver print
Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal

Reinier Vinkeles
Portrait of artist Jacob Cats
1799
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Frans van Mieris the Younger
Portrait of the artist's father, Willem van Mieris
ca. 1737
drawing
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Ottavio Leoni
Portrait of miniaturist Ercole Pedemonte
1614
drawing
Musée Magnin, Dijon

Julius Henricus Quinckhard
Portrait of artist Jan Maurits Quinkhard
1752
drawing
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Annibale Carracci
Portrait of painter Baldassare Aloisi (il Galanino)
ca. 1589-90
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Max Pechstein
Portrait of artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
1906
woodcut
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Samuel Amsler
Portrait of painter Karl Philipp Fohr
1818
etching
Museum Folkwang, Essen

Christopher Hewetson
Portrait of artist Anton Raphael Mengs
ca. 1780-85
marble
Národní Galerie, Prague

Joseph Louis Enderlin
Portrait of artist Ernest Meissonier
1892
plaster
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Louis-François Roubiliac
Portrait of architect Isaac Ware
ca. 1741
marble
Detroit Institute of Arts

Jules Pecher
Portrait of Peter Paul Rubens
1877
marble
Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp

Pain, the Syllable (Die Silbe Schmerz)

It gave itself into your hand:
a You, deathless, 
where all self encountered itself. There was
a vortex of voices without words, empty forms,
and all went into them, mixed,
unmixed and
mixed again.

And numbers were
interwoven with the
Innumerable. A one, a thousand and what
before and after
was larger than itself,
and smaller, and full-
blown, and turning
back and forth into
the germinating Never.

Forgotten things
grasped at things to be forgotten,
earthparts, heartparts
swam,
they sank and swam. Columbus,
mind-
ful of the immortelle, the mother-
flower,
murdered mast and sail. And all put out to sea,

exploratory,
free,
and the wind-rose faded, shed
its leaves, and an ocean
flowered into shape and sight, in the blacklight
of a compass gone berserk. In coffins,
urns, canopies
the children woke up –
Jasper, Agate and Amethyst – nations,
tribes and kinfolk, a blind

LET THERE BE

tied itself into
the snakeheaded free-
coil –: a knot
(a counter knot, anti-knot, tauto-knot, double knot, and thou-
sand knot) at which the deep's
carnival-eyed litter
of star-martens,
letter by letter,
nib-, nib-, nib-
bled.

– Paul Celan, from Die Niemandsrose (S. Fischer-Verlag, 1963), translated by Nikolai Popov & Heather McHugh in Glottal Stop (Wesleyan University Press, 2000)