Fluent

Viktor Schreckengost
Costume Design for the Akron Rubber Ball: Air (female)
1938-39
gouache on board
Akron Museum of Art, Ohio

Viktor Schreckengost
Costume Design for the Akron Rubber Ball:
Air (male)
1938-39
gouache on board
Akron Museum of Art, Ohio

Viktor Schreckengost
Costume Design for the Akron Rubber Ball:
Fire (female)
1938-39
gouache on board
Akron Museum of Art, Ohio

Viktor Schreckengost
Costume Design for the Akron Rubber Ball: Fire (male)
1938-39
gouache on board
Akron Museum of Art, Ohio

Étienne Carjat
Portrait of painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
ca. 1870
albumen silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Étienne Carjat
Portrait of writer Auguste Vacquerie
ca. 1862
albumen silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Étienne Carjat
Standing Model with Comb and Mirror
ca. 1861
albumen silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Étienne Carjat
Standing Model with Comb and Mirror 
ca. 1861
albumen silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Josef Albers
Homage to the Square: Dissolving/Vanishing
1951
oil on panel
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Josef Albers
Homage to the Square
1957
oil on panel
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Josef Albers
Pillars
1928
screenprint
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Josef Albers
White Line Squares
1966
screenprint
Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona

Bartholomeus van der Helst
Portrait of a Man
1649
oil on canvas
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Bartholomeus van der Helst
Portrait of a Man with an Empty Wine Glass
1649
oil on canvas
Národní Galerie, Prague

Bartholomeus van der Helst
Portrait of a Woman
1645
oil on canvas
Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

Bartholomeus van der Helst
Portrait of a Woman
1651
oil on panel
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

from Part One of The Age of Anxiety

And Quant thought:

     All war's woes I can well imagine. 

     Gun-barrels glint, gathered in ambush,

     Mayhem among mountains; minerals break

     In by order on intimate groups of

     Tender tissues; at their tough visit

     Flesh flusters that was so fluent till now,
     Stammers some nonsense, stops and sits down,

     Apathetic to all this. Thousands lie in

     Ruins by roads, irrational in woods,

     Insensitive upon snow-bound plains,

     Or littered lifeless along low coasts

     Where shingle shuffles as shambling waves

     Feebly fiddle in the fading light

     With bloated bodies, beached among groynes,

     Male no longer, unmotivated,

     Have-beens without hopes: Earth takes charge of,

     Soil accepts for a serious purpose

     The jettisoned blood of jokes and dreams,

     Making buds from bone, from brains the good

     Vague vegetable; survivors play

     Cards in kitchens while candles flicker

     And in blood-spattered barns bandaged men,

     Their poor hands in a panic of need

     Groping weakly for a gun-butt or

     A friendly fist, are fetched off darkling.

     Many have perished; more will.

– W.H. Auden (1944-46)