Monday, June 29, 2026

Inward

François-Joseph Navez
Portrait of a Boy
1831
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre


Jean-Joseph Foucou
River God
1785
marble
Musée du Louvre

Philips Koninck
Half-Length Figure of a Man
1662
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Abe Frajndlich
Cindy Sherman, Tabula Rasa
1987
inkjet print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Anthony Friedkin
Brandy, Los Angeles
1970
gelatin silver print
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
(Achenbach Foundation)

Childe Hassam
The New York Window
1912
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Elizabeth Peyton
Spencer
1999
colored pencil on paper
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Man Ray
Le Poète
1938
gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Richard Diebenkorn
Woman in Profile
1958
oil on canvas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Larry Fink
Giselle - Nice, France
1988
gelatin silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Pierre Petit
Portrait of Germaine Lemercier
ca. 1865
albumen silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Lucian Freud
Kai
1991-92
etching
Art Institute of Chicago

Malvina Hoffmann
Pavlova
1924
terracotta
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Amedeo Modigliani
Madame Kisling
ca. 1917
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Vincenzo Gemito
Portait of Giuseppe Verdi
1873
bronze
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Pablo Picasso
Classical Head
1922
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Kingdom of Gandhara
Head of Buddha
AD 150-200
schist
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Who will endure
Heat of day and winter danger,
Journey from one place to another,
Nor be content to lie
Till evening upon headland over bay,
Between the land and sea,
Or smoking wait till hour of food,
Leaning on chained-up gate
At edge of wood?

Metals run
Burnished or rusty in the sun
From town to town,
And signals all along are down;
Yet nothing passes
But envelopes between these places,
Snatched at the gate and panting read indoors,
And first spring flowers arriving smashed,
Disaster stammered over wires,
And pity flashed.
For should professional traveller come,
Asked at the fireside he is dumb,
Declining with a small mad smile
And all the while
Conjectures on the maps that lie
About in ships long high and dry
Grow stranger and stranger.

There is no change of place
But shifting of the head
To keep off glare of lamp from face,
Or climbing over to wall-side of bed;
No one will ever know
For what conversion brilliant capital is waiting,
What ugly feast may village band be celebrating;
For no one goes
Further than railhead or the ends of piers,
Will neither go nor send his son
Further through foothills than the rotting stack
Where gaitered gamekeeper with dog and gun
Will shout 'Turn back'. 

– W.H. Auden (1930)