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| Otto Arpke International Fur Trade Exposition, Leipzig 1929 offset print (poster produced ahead of event) Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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| Marianne Breslauer Longchamp, Paris 1929 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Max Ernst The Hundred-Headed Woman opens her August Sleeve 1929 printed paper collage Menil Collection, Houston |
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| Esther Gehlin Still Life with Cod 1929 oil on canvas Moderna Museet, Stockholm |
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| Rockwell Kent Night Watch 1929 wood-engraving Seattle Art Museum |
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| Fernand Léger Composition with Vine 1929 oil on canvas Seattle Art Museum |
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| André Lhote Three Women 1929 oil on canvas Moderna Museet, Stockholm |
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| William Horace Littlefield Boxers 1929 lithograph Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York |
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| Kenneth Hayes Miller New York Graces 1929 etching Wichita Art Museum, Kansas |
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| Pablo Picasso Woman in Red Armchair 1929 oil on canvas Menil Collection, Houston |
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| Angelo Pinto Three Lights Backstage 1929 wood-engraving McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas |
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| Laurits Andersen Ring Winter in Roskilde 1929 oil on canvas Randers Kunstmuseum, Denmark |
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| August Sander Boxing champion Hein Domgörgen portrayed by artist Heinrich Hoerle 1929 gelatin silver print Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Kurt Schwitters Untitled 1929 collage on paper Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands |
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| William Sommer Figure Studies 1929 watercolor on paper Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Maurice Tabard Hand 1929 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
River Profile
Our body is a moulded river.
Out of a bellicose fore-time, thundering
gallanted for a while by quibbling poplars,
– Novalis
Out of a bellicose fore-time, thundering
head-on collisions of cloud and rock in an
up-thrust, crevasse-and-avalanche, troll-country,
deadly to breathers,
it whelms into our picture below the melt-line,
where tarns lie frore under frowning cirques, goat-bell,
wind-breaker, fishing-rod, miner's-lamp country,
already at ease with
the mien and gestures that become its kindness,
in streams, still anonymous, still jumpable,
flows as it should through any declining country
in probing spirals.
Soon of a size to be named and the cause of
dirty in-fighting among rival agencies,
down a steep stair, penstock-and-turbine country,
it plunges ram-stam,
to foam through a wriggling gorge incised in softer
strata, hemmed between crags that nauntle heaven,
robber-baron, tow-rope, portage-way country,
nightmare of merchants.
Disemboguing from foothills, now in hushed meanders,
now in riffling braids, it vaunts across a senile
plain, well-entered, chateau-and-cider-press country,
its regal progress
gallanted for a while by quibbling poplars,
then by chimneys: led off to cool and launder
retort, steam-hammer, gasometer country,
it changes color.
Polluted, bridged by girders, banked by concrete,
now it bisects a polyglot metropolis,
ticker-tape, taxi, brothel, foot-lights country,
à-la-mode always.
Broadening or burrowing to the moon's phases,
turbid with pulverised wastemantle, on through
flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country
it scours, approaching
the tidal mark where it puts off majesty,
disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta,
punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country,
wearies to its final
act of surrender, effacement, atonement
in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled
attractive child ever dreams of, non-country,
image of death as
a spherical dew-drop of life. Unlovely
monsters, our tales believe, can be translated
too, even as water, the selfless mother
of all especials.
– W.H. Auden (1966)