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| Childe Hassam Strawberry Tea Set 1912 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Childe Hassam Castle Island, Boston Harbor 1916 watercolor, gouache Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Erich Heckel Bathers on the Beach 1913 watercolor Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
Meise: Before you started your dance education there was time when you wanted to be an actress. But you experienced yourself as unable to act. In Feelings are Facts you describe a situation at an Actors' Workshop as follows: 'While trying to fulfill a 'sense-memory' assignment, I pantomimed walking along a riverbank and retrieving a stone from my show. The response was 'We don't believe you'. I couldn't generate a proper illusion. The spectacle of someone trying to create an illusion was not, of course, interesting.' I liked this text passage a lot. Maybe we could appreciate looking at someone who's trying to create illusion.
Rainer: . . . or appreciate looking at failure. A failure can be interesting. Which reminds me of Sally Silvers' solo in AG Indexical where she turns the video around and she's copying the male solo part in Balanchine's Agon. She, of course, has no ballet training whatsoever, and she's imitating this very masculine, physical series of moves which, it's apparent, she can't do in the style in which it's supposed to be executed. So, it's a failure, but it's fascinating because she is so involved in it. She's doing it in her own way. I got this idea and the first time I saw her do it I said: 'OK, that's it. Don't try to make it any better. You're trying to do this thing that is impossible to do perfectly, and you have created something else.' That is exactly what my situation was in acting. In their eyes I was no good at anything I tried. They also said I was too cerebral: 'We can see you thinking'.
– Yvonne Rainer and Michaela Meise, extract from Once a Dancer Always a Dancer: an Interview with Yvonnne Rainer (2008)
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| Erich Heckel Before the Red Curtain 1912 watercolor Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Max Pechstein Summer in Nidden ca. 1919-20 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Max Pechstein The Bathers 1912 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Brücke (exhibition catalog cover) 1911 woodcut Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Auguste Macke Hussars on a Sortie 1913 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Kurt Schwitters Merzbild 1A (The Psychiatrist) 1919 oil, assemblage and collage on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Christian Schad Composition in N 1919 wood relief with collage Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Berlin |
"Without my relationship to what may seem like these inanimate objects, I am just an indulgent misfit. If the spirit of being isn't present in the face of this work, it should be destroyed because it's meaningless. I am not making some things. I am making a synonym for the truth with all its falsehoods, oblique as it is. I am making icons that present life in terms of our death. A bouquet of mistakes."
– Julian Shnabel, from Statement (1978)
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| Wyndham Lewis Composition in Red and Mauve 1914 gouache on paper Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| František Kupka Language of the Verticals 1911 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Edvard Munch Geese in an Orchard ca. 1911 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Bart van der Leck Study for Compositions no. 7 and no. 8 1917 gouache on tracing paper Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |