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Henri Cartier-Bresson Annette and Alberto Giacometti, Paris 1958 gelatin silver print Museum Folkwang, Essen |
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Hugo Erfurth Portrait of sculptor Renée Sintenis 1929 gelatin silver print Museum Ludwig, Cologne |
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Herbert List Pablo Picasso with Tête de Mort, Paris 1944 gelatin silver print Museum Ludwig, Cologne |
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August Sander Jankel Adler (artist) 1924 gelatin silver print Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal |
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August Sander Postmortem Portrait of artist Franz Wilhelm Seiwert 1933 gelatin silver print Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal |
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Reinier Vinkeles Portrait of artist Jacob Cats 1799 drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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Frans van Mieris the Younger Portrait of the artist's father, Willem van Mieris ca. 1737 drawing Hamburger Kunsthalle |
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Ottavio Leoni Portrait of miniaturist Ercole Pedemonte 1614 drawing Musée Magnin, Dijon |
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Julius Henricus Quinckhard Portrait of artist Jan Maurits Quinkhard 1752 drawing Hamburger Kunsthalle |
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Annibale Carracci Portrait of painter Baldassare Aloisi (il Galanino) ca. 1589-90 drawing Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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Max Pechstein Portrait of artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1906 woodcut Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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Samuel Amsler Portrait of painter Karl Philipp Fohr 1818 etching Museum Folkwang, Essen |
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Christopher Hewetson Portrait of artist Anton Raphael Mengs ca. 1780-85 marble Národní Galerie, Prague |
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Joseph Louis Enderlin Portrait of artist Ernest Meissonier 1892 plaster Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon |
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Louis-François Roubiliac Portrait of architect Isaac Ware ca. 1741 marble Detroit Institute of Arts |
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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)