Waters

Milton Avery
Red Rock Falls
1947
oil on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Tom Thomson
Smoke Lake
1915
oil on canvas
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario

Johann Michael Wittmer
Panoramic View on the Islands of Delos
ca. 1840
watercolor on paper
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Gustave Caillebotte
Canal Bank
ca. 1872
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Balthasar Wigand
View across the Danube to the Kahlenberg and Leopoldsberg
ca. 1825
gouache on paper (cabinet miniature)
Lichtenstein Museum, Vienna

Alexandre Calame
Lake Geneva looking toward Villeneuve
1833
watercolor on paper
British Museum

Alex Katz
Ocean View
1992
oil on panel
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Georgia O'Keeffe
Lake George
1922
oil on canvas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Eugène Édouard Soulès
View of Étretat
before 1876
watercolor on paper
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Algernon Talmage
The Lake District for Holidays: Honister Crag
ca. 1925
oil on canvas (design for poster)
National Railway Museum, York

Neil Welliver
Prospect Stream
ca. 1990
oil on canvas
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin

Caspar van Wittel
View with Cascata dell'Aniene, Tivoli
1723
oil on canvas
Villa Cerruti, Castello di Rivoli

Lesser Ury
Tiergarten in Winter
1892
pastel on paper
private collection

Frederick W. Watts
Barges on the Thames
1830
oil on canvas
River and Rowing Museum, Henley-on-Thames

James McNeill Whistler
The Sea, Pourville
1899
oil on canvas
private collection

Mary Bradish Titcomb
Town across the Water
before 1927
oil on canvas
private collection

Giuseppe Zocchi
View of the Tiber with Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome
before 1767
oil on canvas
private collection

from The Statesman

I knew a man who used to say,

Not once but twenty times a day,

That in the turmoil and the strife

(His very words) of Public Life

The thing of ultimate effect

Was Character – not Intellect.

He therefore was at strenuous pains

To atrophy his puny brains

And registered success in this

Beyond the dreams of avarice . . . 

– Hilaire Belloc (1930)

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1977)

Willem De Kooning
Untitled VI
1977
oil on canvas
Menil Collection, Houston

César Domela
Relief no. 167
1977
assemblage of painted wood, aluminum, plexiglas and brass
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Rein Draijer
Takkenbos
1977
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Mary Elizabeth Ernst
Untitled
1977
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Larry Fink
Studio 54
1977
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Nicholas Georgiadis
Costume Design for Cleopatra
in All for Love by John Dryden
1977
watercolor and gouache on paper
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Leon Gilmour
Fuchsias and Cello
1977
wood engraving
San Jose Museum of Art, California

Judith Golden
In Peru
1977
gelatin silver print
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Nan Goldin
Chrissy with her 100-year-old Grandmother, Provincetown
1977
gelatin silver print
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Scott Heiser
Gerard Depardieu
1977
gelatin silver print
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

Jocelyn Herbert
Lulu
1977
lithograph
(poster for Metropolitan Opera production)
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Anton Heyboer
Circumstances
1977
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Jasper Johns
Untitled
1977
screenprint
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Alex Katz
Round Hill
1977
oil on linen
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Bernard Langlais
Summer Music
1977
oil on board
Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine

Nathan Oliveira
Untitled
1977
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

from Precious Five

Be patient, solemn nose,

Serve in a world of prose

The present moment well,

Nor surlily contrast

Its brash ill-mannered smell

With grand scents of the past.

That calm enchanted wood,

That grave world where you stood

So gravely at its middle,

Its oracle and riddle,

Has all been altered, now

In anxious times you serve

As bridge from mouth to brow,

As asymmetric curve 

Thrust outward from a face

Time-conscious into space,

Whose oddness may provoke 

To a mind-saving joke

A mind that would it were

An apathetic sphere:

Point, then, for honor's sake

Up the storm-beaten slope

From memory to hope

The way you cannot take.

– W.H. Auden (1950)

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1968)

Alice Baber
Departure for Lavender (Lavender at the Turn)
1968
oil on canvas
Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami

Betty Hahn
Kodak Tri-X Pan Film
1968
hand-colored gum bichromate print
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Claude Flynn Howell
The Beachcomber
1968
oil on canvas
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Skislope
1968
screenprint
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Duane Michals
Lion Tamer
1968
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Lee Conklin
Moby Grape at the Fillmore, San Francisco
1968
lithograph (poster)
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

Lee Conklin
Procol Harum and Santana
at the Fillmore, San Francisco
1968
lithograph (poster)
Denver Art Museum

Robert Indiana
Number 5
1968
screenprint
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

Art Green
Delicate Situation
1968
oil on canvas
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Francis Celentano
Alpha Diamond I
1968
oil on canvas
Seattle Art Museum

Josef Albers
Homage to the Square: Red Series, Untitled III
1968
oil on panel
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California

Corneille (Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo)
L'Oiseau et la Terre Fleurie
1968
oil on canvas
NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Helen Frankenthaler
Adriatic
1968
oil on canvas
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California

Walter De Maria
Yellow Painting - The Color Men Choose When They Attack The Earth
1968
oil on canvas with stainless-steel plate
Menil Collection, Houston

Charles Cushman
San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts - Restored Colonnade
1968
Kodachrome slide
Indiana University Library, Bloomington

Barbara Crane
Shadow People
1968
gelatin silver print
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California

Objects

All that which lies outside our sort of why, 

Those wordless creatures who are there as well,

Remote from mourning yet in sight and cry,

Make time more golden than we meant to tell.

Tearless, their surfaces appear as deep

As any longing we believe we had;

If shapes can so to their own edges keep,

No separation proves a being bad.

There is less grief than wonder on the whole,

Even at sunset, though, of course we care

Each time the same old shadow falls across

One Person who is not: somewhere, a soul,

Light in her bestial substance, well aware,

Extols the silence of how soon a loss.

– W.H. Auden (1956)

Aestival

Simon Vouet
Summer
(series, The Four Seasons)
ca. 1644-45
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Roger de La Fresnaye
The Bathers
1912
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Joan Miró
Bather
1932
oil on panel
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Théodore Roussel
Summer
1900
etching
British Museum

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Summer
1891
oil on canvas
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Camille Pissarro
Bather
1895
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Grace Hartigan
River Bathers
1953
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Jasper Johns
Summer
1985
encaustic on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Robert Motherwell
Summer Collage
1984-85
acrylic and collage on board
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Anonymous American Photographer
Beach Couple
1929
gelatin silver print
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, New York

Winslow Homer
East Hampton Beach, Long Island
1874
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Otto Müller
Bathers in the Dunes
ca. 1922
oil on burlap
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Henri Matisse
Bather
1909
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

David Park
Bathers
1954
oil on canvas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Max Pechstein
Summer Day
1911
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Stephen Frykholm
Herman Miller Summer Picnic
1979
screenprint (poster)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Hans von Aachen
Personification of Summer
before 1615
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

There is no 'mystery' in Racine – that is to say, there are no metaphysical speculations in him, no suggestions of the transcendental, no hints as to the ultimate nature of reality and the constitution of the world; and so away with him, a creature of mere rhetoric and ingenuities, to the outer limbo!  But if, instead of asking what a writer is without, we try to discover simply what he is, will not our results be more worthy of our trouble?  And in fact, if we once put out of our heads our longing for the mystery of metaphysical suggestion, the more we examine Racine, the more clearly we shall discern in him another kind of mystery, whose presence may eventually console us for the loss of the first – the mystery of the mind of man.  This indeed is the framework of his poetry, and to speak of it adequately would demand a wider scope than that of an essay; for how much might be written of that strange and moving background, dark with the profundity of passion and glowing with the beauty of the sublime, wherefrom the great personages of his tragedies – Hermione and Mithridate, Roxane and Agrippine, Athalie and Phèdre – seem to emerge for a moment towards us, whereon they breathe and suffer, and among whose depths they vanish for ever from our sight!

– Lytton Strachey on Racine (1908)