Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1914)

George Bellows
Portrait of Florence Pierce
1914
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Pierre Bonnard
Cézanne's Bather
1914
lithograph
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Giorgio de Chirico
Le Cerveau de l'Enfant
1914
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Othon Friesz
Interior
1914
oil on canvas
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Marsden Hartley
Portrait Arrangement
1914
oil on canvas
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Jacoba van Heemskerck
Landscape no. 15
1914
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Bernhard Hoetger
Ausstellungen, Künstlerkolonie Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt
1914
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Leon Kroll
Portrait of Manuel Komroff
1914
oil on canvas
Portland Museum of Art, Maine

August Macke
Hat Shop
1914
pastel on paper
Dallas Museum of Art

Franz Marc
Composition III
1914
oil on canvas
Osthaus Museum, Hagen, Germany

Thomas Moran
Pine Buttes, Wyoming
1914
oil on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art

Pablo Picasso
Violin, Sheet Music and Bottle
1914
oil on canvas
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

Morgan Russell
Synchronie
1914
oil on board
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Paul Signac
Antibes, le soir
1914
oil on canvas
Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg

Staffordshire Potteries
Cup and Saucer - Votes for Women
1914
glazed earthenware (ironstone)
Newport Mansions Preservation Society, Rhode Island

Heinrich Vogeler
The Blue Hour, Barkenhoff
1914
oil on canvas
Landesmuseum, Hannover

from Shorts

Among the mammals

only Man has ears

that can display no emotion. 

– W.H. Auden (1972-73)

Dürer

Albrecht Dürer
Studies of the Artist's Left Hand
1493-94
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer
Study of Endres Dürer
1514
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer
Head of a Man
ca. 1503-1505
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Albrecht Dürer
Portrait of Oswolt Krel
1499
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Albrecht Dürer
Lucretia
1518
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Albrecht Dürer
St John the Evangelist and St Peter
1526
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Albrecht Dürer
The Lamentation
ca. 1500
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Albrecht Dürer
Drapery Study
1508
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer
Study for Hands of the Virgin
1506
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer
Fashion Studies of Venetian Woman
1495
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer
Temptation of St Anthony
1515
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer
Wild Man supporting Coat of Arms
ca. 1495
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Albrecht Dürer
Reclining Figure
1501
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer
Seated Priest
1517
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Albrecht Dürer
Mater Dolorosa
(detached from surround)
1495-96
oil on panel
Alte Pinakotech, Munich

Albrecht Dürer
Polittico of the Seven Sorrows
(lacking Mater Dolorosa)
1495-96
oil on panel
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

About the same time of the same summer, the Athenians sent likewise thirty galleys into Peloponnesus under the conduct of Asopius the son of Phormio.  For the Acarnanians had desired them to send some son or kinsman of Phormio for general into those parts.  These, as they sailed by, wasted the maritime country of Laconia, and then sending back the greatest part of his fleet to Athens, Asopius himself with twelve galleys went on to Naupactus.  And afterwards, having raised the whole power of Acarnania, he made war upon the Oeniades and both entered with his galleys into the river of Achelöus and with his land forces wasted the territory.  But when the Oeniades would not yield, he disbanded his land forces and sailed with his galleys to Leucas and landed his soldiers on the territory of Neritum, but in going off was by those of the country that came out to defend it and by some few of the garrison soldiers there both himself and part of his company slain.  And having upon truce received from the Leucadians their dead bodies, they went their ways.   

– from The Peloponnesian War as written by Thucydides (5th century BC) and translated by Thomas Hobbes (1628) and edited by David Grene (1959)

Seasonal

Lodovico Settevecchie and Leonardo da Brescia
The Four Seasons
ca. 1570
fresco
Castello Estense, Ferrara

Neil Welliver
Shadow
1977
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Stuart Franklin
Deer Farm at the Rothiemurcus Estate
2009
inkjet print
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Howard Hodgkin
Spring Rain
2000-2002
oil on panel
Museum of Modern Art, New York

François Barois
Pomona, or, Spring
ca. 1693-1705
marble term
Musée du Louvre

Alfred Edward Chalon
Herb Gatherer
(illustration for 'Spring' in Thomson's Seasons)
1810
drawing
British Museum

Charles Demuth
Spring
1921
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Oleksandr Bohomazov
Rayonist Composition: Spring
1914
oil on canvas
private collection

Maurice Denis
Badminton
1900
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Séraphine
Tree of Paradise
ca. 1928
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Joan Eardley
Harvest
1960
oil on panel
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Kazimir Malevich
To the Harvest: Marthe and Vanka
ca. 1928-29
oil on canvas
State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg

Abraham van Diepenbeeck
Harvest Feast
before 1675
ink and wash on paper
British Museum

Ettore Tito
Autumn
1914
oil on canvas
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome

Maurice de Vlaminck
Autumn Landscape
ca. 1905
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Charmion von Wiegand
The Wheel of the Seasons
1957
oil on canvas
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Meissen Manufactory (Dresden)
Figures of the Four Seasons
18th century
porcelain
Musée du Louvre

    Most readers, at the present day, now that the whole noisy controversy has long taken its quiet place in the perspective of Time, would, I think, agree that Diderot and the rest of the Encyclopaedists were mistaken.  As we see him now, in that long vista, Rousseau was not a wicked man; he was an unfortunate, a distracted, a deeply sensitive, a strangely complex, creature; and, above all else, he possessed the quality which cut him off from his contemporaries, which set an immense gulf betwixt him and them: he was modern.  Among those quick, strong, fiery people of the eighteenth century, he belonged to another world – to the new world of self-consciousness, and doubt, and hesitation, of mysterious melancholy and quiet intimate delights, of long reflexions amid the solitudes of Nature, of infinite introspection amid the solitudes of the heart.  Who can wonder that he was misunderstood, and buffeted, and driven mad?  Who can wonder that, in his agitation, his perplexities, his writhings, he seemed, to the pupils of Voltaire, little less than a frenzied fiend?  'Cet homme est un forcené!'  Diderot exclaims. 'Je tâche en vain de faire de la poésie, mais cet homme me revient tout à travers mon travail; il me trouble, et je suis comme si j'avais à côté de moi un damné: il est damné, cela est sûr . . .  J'avoue que je n'ai jamais éprouvé un trouble d'âme si terrible que celui que j'ai . . .  Que je me revois plus cet homme-là, il me ferait croire au diable et à l'enfer.  Si je suis jamais forcé de retourner chez lui, je suis sûr que je frémirai tout le long du chemin: j'avais la fièvre en revenant . . .  On entendait ses cris jusqu'au bout du jardin; et je le voyais!  . . .  Les poètes ont bien fait de mettre un intervalle immense entre le ciel and les enfers.  En vérité, la main me tremble.'   Every word of that is stamped with sincerity; Diderot was writing from his heart.  But he was wrong; the 'intervalle immense' across which, so strangely and so horribly, he had caught glimpses of what he had never seen before, was not the abyss between heaven and hell, but between the old world and the new. 

– Lytton Strachey on Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1907)

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1913)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Figures in Landscape
1913
oil on canvas
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Self Portrait with Erna Schilling
1913
oil on canvas
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

Max Klinger
Half-Length Figure Study
1913
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Henri Le Sidaner
Country House among Roses
1913
oil on canvas
Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp

Wyndham Lewis
Drawing for Timon of Athens, Act IV
1913
lithograph
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Wilton Lockwood
Peonies
1913
oil on canvas
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

August Macke
Clown (Self Portrait)
1913
oil on canvas
Kunstsammlungen, Chemnitz, Germany

August Macke
Figures beside Blue Lake
1913
oil on canvas
Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe

August Macke
Walk on the Bridge
1913
oil on board
Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt

Burkhardt Mangold
Burger-Kehl & Co.
1913
lithograph
(poster advertising chain of clothing stores)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

John Tinney McCutcheon
Effect of the Tariff on Women's Fashions
1913
drawing (print study)
Art Institute of Chicago

Ludwig Meidner
Portrait of writer Max Herrmann-Neisse
1913
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Jean Metzinger
Woman with Fan
1913
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Pablo Picasso
Harlequin
1913
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Laurits Andersen Ring
Summer Day in Enø
1913
oil on canvas
Ribe Kunstmuseum, Denmark

Paul Sérusier
Synchronie en Vert
1913
oil on canvas
Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao

No, Plato, No

I can't imagine anything

    that I would less like to be

than a disincarnate Spirit,

    unable to chew or sip

or make contact with surfaces

    or breathe the scents of summer

or comprehend speech and music

    or gaze at what lies beyond.

No, God has placed me exactly

    where I'd have chosen to be:

the sub-lunar world is such fun,

    where Man is male and female

and gives Proper Names to all things.
 

    I can, however, conceive

that the organs Nature gave Me, 

    my ductless glands, for instance,

slaving twenty-four hours a day

    with no show of resentment

to gratify Me, their Master,

    and keep Me in decent shape,

(not that I give them orders,

    I wouldn't know what to yell),

dream of another existence

    than that they have known so far:

yes, it well could be that my Flesh

    is praying for "Him" to die,

so setting Her free to become 

    irresponsible Matter.

– W.H. Auden (1973)