Frigid

Wilson Bentley
Twenty Snow Crystals
ca. 1920
gelatin silver print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
(Achenbach Foundation)

Elisheva Biernoff
Winter
2015
acrylic on plywood with painted poplar stand
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Esther Bubley
Pupils returning to School
after Lunch at the General Store, East Orange, Vermont
ca. 1953
gelatin silver print
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Denys van Alsloot
Winter Landscape with view of Tervuren Castle
1614
oil on panel
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

Max Beckmann
Winter Landscape
1930
oil on canvas
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands

Frank Hurley
Banded Face of Ice Shelf
ca. 1913
carbon print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Georgia O'Keeffe
Black Door with Snow II
1955
oil on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Madoka Takagi
East River Park, New York
1990
platinum-palladium print
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Richard Kauffman
Mount St Elias from Upper King Glacier
ca. 1958
tricolor carbro print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Abbott Handerson Thayer
Winter, Monadnock
ca. 1900
watercolor and gouache on paper
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Arthur Lismer
A Clear Winter
ca. 1940
oil on canvas
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Peter Doig
Pink Snow
1991
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Caspar David Friedrich
Winter Landscape
ca. 1811
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Frank Thiel
Perito Moreno #11
ca. 2012-13
C-print
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Andrew Wyeth
Chestnut Ridge
ca. 1944
watercolor on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Kasimir Malevich
Morning in the Village after a Snowstorm
1912
oil on canvas
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Wilson Bentley
Frost
ca. 1910
gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Coming to Racine with Shakespeare and the rest of the Elizabethans warm in his memory, it is only to be expected that [the English reader] should be struck with a chilling sense of emptiness and unreality.  After the colour, the moving multiplicity, the imaginative luxury of our early tragedies, which seem to have been moulded out of Nature herself, the Frenchman's dramas, with their rigid uniformity of setting, their endless duologues, their immense harangues, their spectral confidants, their strict exclusion of all visible action, give one at first the same sort of impression as a pretentious pseudo-classical summer-house appearing suddenly at the end of a vista, after one has been rambling through an open forest. 'La scène est à Buthrote, ville d'Epire, dans une salle du palais de Pyrrhus' – could anything be more discouraging than such an announcement?  Here is nothing for the imagination to feed on, nothing to raise expectation, no wondrous vision of 'blasted heaths' or the 'seaboard of Bohemia'; here is only a hypothetical drawing-room conjured out of the void for five acts, simply in order that the persons of the drama may have a place to meet in and make their speeches.

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The true justification for the unities of time and place is to be found in the conception of drama as the history of a spiritual crisis – the vision, thrown up, as it were, by a bull's-eye lantern, of the final catastrophic phases of a long series of events.  Very different were the views of the Elizabethan tragedians, who aimed at representing not only the catastrophe but the whole development of circumstances of which it was the effect; they traced, with elaborate and abounding detail, the rise, the growth, the decline, and the ruin of great causes and great persons; and the result was a series of masterpieces unparalleled in the literature of the world.  . . .  But Racine carried out his ideals more rigorously and more boldly than any of his successors.  He fixed the whole of his attention upon the spiritual crisis; to him that alone was of importance; and the conventional classicism so disheartening to the English reader – the unities, the harangues, the confidences, the absence of local colour, and the concealment of the action – was no more than the machinery for enhancing the effect of the inner tragedy, and for doing away with every side issue and every chance of distraction.

– Lytton Strachey on Racine (1908)