Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Presences of the 1940s

Ilse Bing
Self Portrait
1945
gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Italo Cremona
Interior
1941
oil on canvas
Galleria Sabauda, Turin

Diamantis Diamantopoulos
Plasterer
1949
screenprint
National Museum, Athens

Yannis Tsarouhis
Figure on Bed
1940
oil on canvas
National Museum, Athens

Max Beckmann
Odysseus and Calypso
1943
oil on canvas
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Yasuo Kuniyoshi
Mother and Daughter
1945
oil on canvas
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Giovanni Colacicchi
St Sebastian
1943
oil on canvas
Palazzo Pitti, Florence

Jared French
Evasion
1947
tempera on canvas, mounted on panel
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Keith Vaughan
Nude in Landscape
1948
oil on canvas
Princeton University Art Museum

Philip Pearlstein
Double Portrait of the Artist's Parents
1943
oil on masonite
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Asger Jorn
Plunk
1940
oil on board
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Hans Arp
Head with Claws
1949
bronze
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Henry Moore
Three Figures
1948
drawing, with watercolor
Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio

Willem Hofhuizen
Self Portrait
1940
oil on panel
Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht

Anton Kolig
S'Ottole
1941
oil on board
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Henri Matisse
Asia
1946
oil on canvas
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

For this one thing above all I would be praised as a man,
That in my words and my deeds I have kept those laws in mind
Olympian Zeus, and that high clear Empyrean,
Fashioned, and not some man or people of mankind, 
Even those sacred laws nor age nor sleep can blind.

A man becomes a tyrant out of insolence,
He climbs and climbs, until all people call him great,
He seems upon the summit, and God flings him thence;
Yet an ambitious man may lift up a whole State,
And in his death be blessed, in his life fortunate.

And all men honour such; but should a man forget
The holy images, the Delphian Sibyl's trance,
And the world's navel-stone, and not be punished for it,
And seem most fortunate, or even blessed perchance,
Why should we honour the Gods, or join the sacred dance?

– Sophocles, chorus from King Oedipus (429 BC), translated by W.B. Yeats (1928)