 Jasper Johns Target 1974 screenprint Seattle Art Museum |
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| Duane Michals Self Portrait with My Guardian Angel 1974 gelatin silver print Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Marsden Mompremier Siren 1974 oil on panel Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia |
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| Robert Motherwell Royal Fireworks Music 1974 acrylic and collage on board North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh |
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| Robert Motherwell Window over Madrid 1974 acrylic on canvas North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh |
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| Graham Nash Self Portrait in the Plaza 1974 inkjet print Portland Museum of Art, Maine |
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| Elizabeth Osborne Manchester 1974 watercolor on paper Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington |
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| Robert Rauschenberg Treaty 1974 lithograph Dallas Museum of Art |
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| Leonard Rickhard Still Life 1974 oil on canvas Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo |
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| Babe Shapiro Dogleg 1974 acrylic on canvas Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia |
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| Ben Willikens Hallway 1974 acrylic on canvas Museum Gouda |
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| Frank Stella Le Neveu de Rameau 1974 acrylic on canvas Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami |
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| George Tooker Woman at the Wall 1974 tempera on panel New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut |
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| Shedrich Williams Fisherman's Back 1974 gelatin silver print San Jose Museum of Art, California |
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| Lucia Woods Lindley Wilsford Manor, Wiltshire, Estate of Stephen Tennant 1974 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Frans Zwartjes Situation 1974 gelatin silver print Kunstmuseum, The Hague |
Makers of History
Serious historians care for coins and weapons,
Not those re-iterations of one self-importance
By whom they date them,
Knowing that clerks could soon compose a model
As manly as any of whom schoolmasters tell
Their yawning pupils,
With might-be maps of might-have-been campaigns,
Showing in color the obediences
Before and after,
Quotes from four-letter pep-talks to the troops
And polysyllabic reasons to a Senate
For breaking treaties.
Simple to add how Greatness, incognito,
Admired plain-spoken comment on itself
By Honest John,
And simpler still the phobia, the perversion,
Such curiosa as tease humanistic
Unpolitical palates.
How justly legend melts them into one
Composite demi-god, prodigious worker,
Deflecting rivers,
Walling in cities with his two bare hands,
The burly slave of ritual and a martyr
To Numerology.
With twelve twin brothers, three wives, seven sons,
Five weeks a year he puts on petticoats,
Stung mortally
During a nine-day tussle with King Scorpion,
Dies in the thirteenth month, becomes immortal
As a constellation.
Clio loves those who bred them better horses,
Found answers to their questions, made their things,
Even those fearsome
Bards they boarded but these mere commanders,
Like boys in pimple time, like girls at awkward ages,
What did they do but wish?
– W.H. Auden (1955)