Plants & Flowers Rendered by Artists in Two Dimensions

Anonymous Artist working in England
Lady's Slipper Orchid
1906
watercolor
Wellcome Collection, London

Jan van den Hecke
Anemones in a Glass Vase
ca. 1650-56
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Jan Anton van der Baren
Roses in a Glass Vase
ca. 1659
oil on vellum
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Wolfgang Tillmans
Affinity
2009
inkjet print
Art Institute of Chicago

Vase Poppies

Lavenderish dusk
strapped for stays,
pomegranates under the rubberband
chucked for a glass Oz,

letdown
splayed by the pillar-shelves
to page upon the Ottoman:

his talk has wrought suit
amid citrus gapes
and pall dunked in the bowl
and grated sage
or cleaved clear paleo-pines.

Postgeist, upcast
California upon weed,
what banker yields
so fragrant a cant
as this vagrant cant?

– Jennifer Scappettone (2010)

Raoul Dufy
Les Altheas
(fabric design for Bianchini Férier, Lyon)
ca. 1914-20
screen-printed silk
Art Institute of Chicago

Eliot Porter
Frostbitten Apples, Tesuque, New Mexico
1966
dye imbibition print
Art Institute of Chicago

Eliot Porter
Moss, Waterfall, Cinders near Mt Hekla, Iceland
1972
dye imbibition print
Art Institute of Chicago

Daniel Seghers
Madonna and Child framed by Flowers
(figures in grisaille by Erasmus Quellinus the Younger)
ca. 1645
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Jan Philips van Thielen
Madonna and Child framed by Flowers
(figures in grisaille by Erasmus Quellinus the Younger)
1648
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

John Singer Sargent
Thistles
ca. 1883-89
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Henri Matisse
Still Life with Geranium
1906
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Charles Sheeler
Geraniums, Pots, Spaces
1923
drawing
(charcoal, Conté crayon, colored pencils)
Art Institute of Chicago

Henri Fantin-Latour
Still Life with Flowers
1881
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Henri Fantin-Latour
Roses in a Bowl
1881
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Drawings and Prints from the Long Twentieth Century

Vaughan Trowbridge
The Forge, Limoges
1902
etching
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
(Achenbach Foundation)

Anders Zorn
Portrait of Betty Nansen
ca. 1905
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Gordon Craig
Hecuba
1908
woodcut
Victoria & Albert Museum

John Singer Sargent
Figure of Pan
(sketches for the rotunda mural at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
ca. 1917-21
drawing
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Lovis Corinth
Apocalyptic Rider
1917
drawing, with gouache
Art Institute of Chicago

Eschatology

I accompany this life's events like a personal journalist:
"Little did she know when she got in the car that afternoon . . ."
or "Despite inauspicious beginnings,
this was to be their happiest year."

Little did I expect that our horoscopes would prove true.
And how could we foresee an answer to
that frankly secular prayer, we with so little faith
as to be false prophets to our most fortunate gifts.

I am glad when doom fails. Inept apocalypse
is a specialty of the times: the suffering of the rich
at the hand of riches; the second and third comings of wars.

Shouldn't we refuse prediction
that the untried today is guilty, that immeasurable
as this child's hope is, it will break tomorrow?

– Sandra McPherson (1970)

Lovis Corinth
Portrait of Charlotte Berend Corinth
1920
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Lovis Corinth
Self-Portrait
1924
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Lovis Corinth
Bust of Sophocles with Animal Skull
ca. 1923-25
drypoint
Art Institute of Chicago

Henri Matisse
Portrait of Léonide Massine
1920
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Leonard Baskin
Thomas Eakins
1964
etching and aquatint
Art Institute of Chicago

David Ligare
Drapery Study
1979
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Elisabeth Frink
Bird Man
1961
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Andy Warhol
The Kiss (Bela Lugosi)
1963
screenprint
Art Institute of Chicago

Willem de Kooning
Studies - Women's Torsos
1952
charcoal and pastel
Art Institute of Chicago

Theseus - Victorian and Modernist

Phoebe Anna Traquair
Theseus offers himself as a sacrifice to the Minotaur
(design for enamelled plaque)
1904
drawing, with watercolor
Victoria & Albert Museum

Phoebe Anna Traquair
Ariadne provides Theseus with a sword to slay the Minotaur
and a ball of thread to escape the Labyrinth
(design for enamelled plaque)
1904
drawing, with watercolor
Victoria & Albert Museum

Phoebe Anna Traquair
Theseus slays the Minotaur
(design for enamelled plaque)
1904
drawing, with watercolor
Victoria & Albert Museum

Phoebe Anna Traquair
Ariadne accompanies Theseus on his way home to Athens
(design for enamelled plaque)
1904
drawing, with watercolor
Victoria & Albert Museum

The Ships of Theseus

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians . . . for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.           
                                                                                              – Plutarch, Vita Thesel 


The answer of course is that the ship
doesn't exist, that "ship"
is an abstraction, a conception,
an imaginary tarp thrown
across the garden of the real.
The answer is that the cheap
peasantry of things toils all day
in the kingdom of language,
every ship a casket
of words: bulkhead, transom,
mast steps. The answer
is to wake again to the banality
of things, to wade toward
the light inside the plasma
of ideas. But each plank
is woven from your mother's
hair. The blade of each oar
contains the shadow of
a horse. The answer
is that the self is the glue between
the boards, the cartilage
that holds a world together,
that self is the wax in
the stenographer's ears,
that there is nothing the mind
won't sacrifice, each item
another goat tossed into
the lava of our needs.
The answer is that this is just
another poem about divorce,
about untombing the mattress
from the sofa, your body
laid out on the bones of the
double-jointed frame, about
separation, rebuilding, about
your daughter's missing
teeth. Each time you visit
now you find her partially
replaced, more sturdily
jointed, the weathered joists
of her childhood being stripped
away. New voice. New hair.
The answer is to stand there
redrawing the constellation
of the word daughter in
your brain while she tries
to understand exactly who
you are, and breathes out
girl after girl into the entry-
way, a fog of strangers that
almost evaporates when
you say each other's
names. Almost, but not quite.
Let it be enough. Already,
a third ship moves
quietly toward you in the night.

– Steve Gehrke (2013)

Edwin Austin Abbey
Enter Theseus
(illustration for A Midsummer Night's Dream)
ca. 1896
gouache on paper
Yale University Art Gallery

Lovis Corinth
Theseus and Ariadne
1914
drypoint
Cleveland Museum of Art

Antoine-Louis Barye
Theseus slaying the Centaur Bianor
ca. 1850
bronze
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Antoine-Louis Barye
Theseus and the Minotaur
ca. 1860
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Edward Burne-Jones
Theseus and the Minotaur in the Labyrinth
(design for glazed tile)
1861
wash drawing
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (West Midlands)

Jacques Lipchitz
Theseus
1943
etching, engraving and aquatint
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
(Achenbach Foundation)

Jacques Lipchitz
Theseus
ca. 1944
etching
Art Institute of Chicago

Juan Junyer
Man in Helmet - Theseus
1947
screenprint
Art Institute of Chicago

Keith Vaughan
Theseus
(final study for 'Dome of Discovery' at the Festival of Britain)
ca. 1950
oil on panel
Ingram Collection, London

Keith Vaughan
Theseus
(study for painting)
1950
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum

Keith Vaughan
Theseus
(study for painting)
1950
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum

Sphinxes in Two Dimensions

Luzio Luzzi
Reclining Sphinx with Small Ape
before 1575
drawing
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Annibale Carracci
Male Sphinx
before 1609
drawing
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Carlo Maratti after Annibale Carracci
Winged Sphinx and another Ornamental Motif
after frescoes in Galleria Farnese, Rome
before 1713
drawing
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Henry Fuseli
Oedipus and the Sphinx (after Sophocles)
1770-72
drawing
British Museum

Louis-Jean Desprez
Sepulchre in Egyptian Style with Sphinxes and Owl
ca. 1779-84
wash drawing
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Maxime Du Camp
Sphinx, Giza (partially excavated)
1850
salted paper print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Elihu Vedder
The Questioner of the Sphinx
1863
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Oedipus and the Sphinx
1864
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Georg von Rosen
The Sphinx
1887
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Cadmus and Harmonia

Far, far from here,
The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay
Among the green Illyrian hills; and there
The sunshine in the happy glens is fair,
And by the sea, and in the brakes.
The grass is cool, the sea-side air
Buoyant and fresh, the mountain flowers
More virginal and sweet than ours.

And there, they say, two bright and aged snakes,
Who once were Cadmus and Harmonia,
Bask in the glens or on the warm sea-shore,
In breathless quiet, after all their ills;
Nor do they see their country, nor the place
Where the Sphinx lived among the frowning hills,
Nor the unhappy palace of their race,
Nor Thebes, nor the Ismenus, any more.

There those two live, far in the Illyrian brakes!
They had stay'd long enough to see,
In Thebes, the billow of calamity
Over their own dear children roll'd,
Curse upon curse, pang upon pang,
For years, they sitting helpless in their home,
A grey old man and woman; yet of old
The Gods had to their marriage come,
And at the banquet all the Muses sang.

Therefore they did not end their days
In sight of blood, but were rapt, far away,
To where the west-wind plays,
And murmurs of the Adriatic come
To those untrodden mountain-lawns; and there
Placed safely in changed forms, the pair
Wholly forgot their first sad life, and home,
And all that Theban woe, and stray
For ever through the glens, placid and dumb.

– Matthew Arnold (1852)

Odilon Redon
Sphinx
before 1916
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Johannes Josephus Aarts
Oedipus and the Sphinx
before 1934
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Leon Golub
Wounded Sphinx
1965
lithograph
Tate Gallery

Joseph Beuys
Electric Sphinx
1977
drawing
Tate Gallery

Ivor Abrahams
The Sphinx
1978
screenprint
Tate Gallery

Francis Bacon
Oedipus and the Sphinx (after Ingres)
1983
oil on canvas
Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon