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| Ansel Adams Pipes and Gauges, West Virginia 1939 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Yuri Albert Untitled (Triangle) 1939 pigment on panel Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina |
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| George Copeland Ault Barn 1939 gouache on board Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee |
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| Rudy Burckhardt New York 1939 gelatin silver print Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine |
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| Leroy Flint Park Politicians 1939 engraving and aquatint (WPA project) Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Ian Grant Self Portrait 1939 oil on canvas Manchester Art Gallery |
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| Lovering Hathaway Rev. Israel Leonard House 1939 watercolor on paper Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine |
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| Jean Hélion Composition Dramatique 1939 oil on canvas (gift of Peggy Guggenheim) Seattle Art Museum |
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| Hans Hofmann Yellow Vase on Red 1939 oil on canvas Dallas Museum of Art |
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| Vilmos Huszár Dancers 1939 oil on canvas Kunstmuseum, The Hague |
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| Herschel C. Logan Tornado 1939 woodcut Wichita Art Museum, Kansas |
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| Piet Mondrian Abstraction 1939 oil on canvas Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas |
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| Everett Spruce Twins 1939 oil on canvas Dallas Museum of Art |
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| Seneca Textile Corporation (New York) Fabric Panel - New York World's Fair 1939 screen-printed cotton Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Seneca Textile Corporation (New York) Fabric Panel - New York World's Fair 1939 screen-printed cotton Art Institute of Chicago |
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| John Xceron Untitled 1939 oil on canvas Wichita Art Museum, Kansas |
from Thanksgiving for a Habitat
I. Prologue: The Birth of Architecture
(for John Bayley)
From gallery-grave and the hunt of a wren-king
to Low Mass and trailer-camp
is hardly a tick by the carbon-clock, but I
don't count that way nor do you:
already it is millions of heart-beats ago
back to the Bicycle Age,
before which is no After for me to measure,
just a still prehistoric Once
where anything could happen. To you, to me,
Stonehenge and Chartres Cathedral,
the Acropolis, Blenheim, the Albert Memorial
are works by the same Old Man
under different names: we know what He did,
what, even, He thought He thought,
but we don't see why. (To get that, one would have
to be selfish in His way,
without concrete or grapefruit.) It's our turn now
to puzzle the unborn. No world
wears as well as it should but, mortal or not,
a world has still to be built
because of what we can see from our windows,
that Immortal Commonwealth
which is there regardless: it's in perfect taste
and it's never boring but
it won't quite do. Among its populations
are masons and carpenters
who build the most exquisite shelters and safes,
but no architects, any more
than there are heretics or bounders: to take
umbrage at death, to construct
a second nature of tomb, and temple, lives
must know the meaning of If.
– W.H. Auden (1960)