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| Georges Braques (France) The Pink Tablecloth 1938 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Edvard Munch (Norway) Encounter in Space 1899 woodcut Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"I think that the demand for a theory of successful thinking cannot be satisfied, and that it is not the same as the demand for a theory of creative thinking. Success depends on many things – for example on luck. It may depend on meeting with a promising problem. It depends on not being anticipated. It depends on such things as a fortunate division of one's time between trying to keep up-to-date and concentrating on working out one's own ideas. But it seems to me that what is essential to 'creative' or 'inventive' thinking is a combination of intense interest in some problem (and thus a readiness to try again and again) with highly critical thinking; with a readiness to attack even those presuppositions which for less critical thought determine the limits of the range from which trials (conjectures) are selected; with an imaginative freedom that allows us to see so far unsuspected sources of error: possible prejudices in need of critical examination."
– Karl Popper, from Autobiography (1974)
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| Simon Vouet (France) study for Altarpiece in St Peter's, Rome 1625 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Simon Vouet (France) study for Altarpiece in St Peter's, Rome 1625 canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Roberto Matta (Chile) The Dazzling Outcast: Great Expectations 1966 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Guido Reni (Bologna) Portrait of Roberto Ubaldino, Papal Legate to Bologna 1627 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Giovanni Francesco Romanelli (Rome) St John and St Peter at Christ's Tomb ca. 1640 oil on silvered copper Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (Germany) Reflecting Clouds 1936 watercolor Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (Germany) Sea Snails 1953 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Alonso Cano (Sapin) Christ in Limbo 1655 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Scarsellino (Ferrara) Saint Demetrius late 16th century oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Léon-Mathieu Cochereau (France) Studio of Jacques-Louis David 1814 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Jacquiot Ponce (France) La Tireuse d'épine 16th century terracotta Louvre, Paris |
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| Hans Thoma (Germany) The Spring 1895 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
"The first major American financial crisis was the Panic of 1819 and that was the first event that showed ordinary people in diverse geographic areas that some incomprehensible thing that happened on Wall Street could make a major change in their life. Now, of course, there had been hard times before that, but generally in relation to wars, crop failures, droughts and other phenomena that were visible and could be understood. ... So about 1820, you begin to get that kind of literature about bankruptcy and failure. But there's a 180-degree shift in the way the word failure is used: from 1820 through the Civil War, or thereabouts, failure was used to describe people who met economic catastrophe, but the construction was, 'I made a failure,' rather than 'I am a failure.' It was an event that could be discrete, without touching upon one's moral and existential being. So the first meaning of failure before the Civil War is bankruptcy. If you say, 'He made a failure,' it means he's a bankrupt businessman and, more specifically, it means somebody who was too ambitious. He ran his credit up too far, he tried to expand the business too quickly, or he moved into a sideline business that was not the thing he knew the most about. If you ask an ordinary American today to describe a person who is a failure, they would say, 'An underachiever who sort of ambles through life without a real plan and is stagnant.' And that's a 180-degree shift from failure as a person who is an over-achiever and too ambitious to someone who is an underachiever, not ambitious enough. ... The two major drivers of changing American attitudes toward failure in the long term have been, obviously, the growth of capitalism, and, much less obviously, the emancipation of the slaves. Prior to the Civil War, there were two categories of identity in American life: slaves and free people. After the Civil War, there are two categories of identity in American life: successes and failures."
– from an interview with Scott A. Sandage, author of Born Loser : A History of Failure in America (2005)