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| Richard Anuszkiewicz Open Door 1953 oil on board Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Hans Arp Aquatic 1953 marble Walker Art Center, Minneapolis |
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| Stern Bramson Party for Employees and Families, National Cash Register Corporation 1953 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Byron Browne Dance of Bacchus 1953 oil on canvas Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas |
-Chicago-1953-gelatin-silver-print-North-Carolina-Museum-of-Art-Raleigh.jpg) |
| Harry Callahan Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago 1953 gelatin silver print North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh |
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| Freddy Dosh Still Life 1953 oil on board Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands |
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| Louis Fernandez Buste de femme nue 1953 oil on canvas Menil Collection, Houston |
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| Auguste Herbin Fou 1953 screenprint Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami |
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| Osbert Lancaster Stage Design for Stravinsky opera The Rake's Progress 1953 watercolor, gouache and collage on paper McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas |
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| Leon Levinstein Coney Island 1953 gelatin silver print Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Michael Loew Diagonal Space Elements #2 1953 oil on canvas Dallas Museum of Art |
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| Luigi Lucioni Still Life with Leaves 1953 oil on canvas Fleming Museum of Art, Burlington, Vermont |
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| Veikko Marttinen Composition 1953 oil on panel Moderna Museet, Stockholm |
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| Henri Matisse Ivy in Flower 1953 painted paper collage mounted on canvas Dallas Museum of Art |
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| Rollie McKenna The Castle at Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, Wales 1953 gelatin silver print Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York |
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| Mark Rothko Untitled 1953 oil on canvas Walker Art Center, Minneapolis |
from Dichtung und Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem)
XXX
Autobiographers are just like other historians: some are Whigs, some Tories, some Geistesgeschichtswissenshaftler, some Feuilletonistes, etc. (I should like to believe that I think I love You more as De Tocqueville might have thought it than De Maistre.)
XXXI
The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist. (It is relatively easy to guess when one should think as a physician.)
XXXII
Who am I? (Was ist denn eigentlich mit mir geschehen?) Several answers are plausible, but there can no more be one definitive answer than there can be one definitive history of the Thirty Years' War.
XXXIII
Alas, it is as impossible that my answer to the question Who are You? and your answer to the question "Who am I?" should be the same as that either of them should be exactly and completely true. But if they are not the same, and neither is quite true, then my assertion I love You cannot be quite true either.
XXXIV
"I love you"; "Je t'aime"; "Ich liebe Dich"; "Io t'amo" . . . there is no language on earth into which this phrase cannot be exactly translated, on condition that, for what is meant by it, speech is unnecessary, so long as, instead of opening his mouth, the speaker might equally well point a finger first at himself, then at "You" and follow this up with a gesture in imitation of the act of "making love".
Under these conditions the phrase is devoid both of I-feeling and You-feeling; "I" means "this" member of the human race (not my drinking companion or the bartender), "You" means "that" member of the human race (not the cripple to your left, the baby to your right or the old crone behind you) and "love" identifies "which" physical need I am at this moment the passive victim of (I am not asking the way to a good restaurant or the nearest W.C.).
– W.H. Auden (1959)