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| Barbara Morgan Amaryllis Seed Pod 1943 gelatin silver print Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia |
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| Alice Neel Julie and the Doll 1943 oil on canvas McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas |
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| Pablo Picasso Buffet: Still Life with Glasses and Cherries 1943 oil on canvas Menil Collection, Houston |
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| Edward Weston Neil 1943 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Josef Albers Untitled 1943 oil on board Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina |
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| Esther Bubley Spectators at Memorial Day Services, Arlington Cemetery 1943 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Marsden Hartley Roses 1943 oil on canvas Walker Art Center, Minneapolis |
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| George Platt Lynes Marsden Hartley 1943 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Robert Motherwell Untitled 1943 watercolor and ink on paper Menil Collection, Houston |
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| George Lovett Kingsland Morris House-to-House Fighting 1943 oil on canvas McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas |
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| Kenneth Heilbron Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, Savannah, Illinois 1943 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Frederick Carder Head 1943 cast glass Wichita Art Museum, Kansas |
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| Georges Braque Pitcher, Candlestick and Black Fish 1943 oil on canvas Menil Collection, Houston |
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| Opal Fleckenstein Mountain Snows 1943 watercolor on paper Seattle Art Museum |
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| Helen Spang Pearce Devil Flower 1943 oil on panel Dallas Museum of Art |
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| Raphael Soyer Farewell 1943 lithograph Wright Museum of Art, Beloit, Wisconsin |
Dame Kind
Steatopygous, sow-dugged
and owl-headed,
To Whom – Whom else? – the first innocent blood
was formally shed
By a chinned mammal that hard times
had turned carnivore,
From Whom his first promiscuous orgy
begged a downpour
To speed the body-building cereals
of a warmer age:
Now who put us, we should like to know,
in Her manage?
Strait-laced She never was
and has not grown more so,
Since the skeptical academies got wind
of the Chi-Rho
St Cuckoo's wooden church for Her
where on Green Sundays
Bald hermits celebrate a wordless
cult in Her praise:
So pocket your fifty sonnets, Bud;
tell her a myth
Of unpunishable gods and all the girls
they interfered with.
Haven't we spotted Her Picked Winners
whom she cossets, ramparts
And does the handsome by? Didn't the darlings
have cold hearts?
. . . ONE BOMB WOULD BE ENOUGH. . . . Now look
who's thinking gruesome!
Brother, you're worse than a lonesome Peeper
or a He-Virgin
Who nightly abhors the Primal Scene
in medical Latin:
She mayn't be all She might be but
She is our Mum.
You can't tell us your hypochondriac
Blue-Stocking from Provence
Who makes the clock-work arcadies go round
is worth tuppence;
You won't find a steady in that museum
unless your prefer
Tea with a shapeless angel to bedtime
with a lovely monster:
Before you catch it for your mim look
and gnostic chirrup,
Ask the Kind Lady who fitted you out
to fix you up.
Supposing even (through misdirections
or your own mischief)
You do land in that anomalous duchy,
Her remotest fief,
Where four eyes encounter in two
one mirror perilous
As the clear rock-basin that stultified
frigid Narcissus,
Where tongues stammer on a First Name,
bereft of guile,
And common snub-nosed creatures are abashed
at a face in profile,
Even there, as your blushes invoke its Guardian
(whose true invocable
Name is singular for each true heart
and false to tell)
To sacre your courtship ritual so
it deserves a music
More solemn than the he-hawing
of a salesman's limerick,
Do a bow to the Coarse Old Party that wrought you
an alderliefest
Of the same verbose and sentient kidney,
grateful not least
For all the dirty work She did.
How many hundreds
Of lawful, unlawful, both equally
loveless beds,
Of lying endearments, crooked questions,
crookeder answers,
Of bawling matches, sarcastic silences,
megrims, tears,
How much half-witted horse-play and sheer
bloody misrule
It took to bring you two together
both on schedule?
– W.H. Auden (1959)