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| Jean Charles Frontier Time revealing Truth 1755 drawing on blue paper Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |
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| Januarius Zick Resurrection of Christ 1760 drawing on blue paper Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |
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| Jean-Louis Deprez Somerset House - the Strand Vestibule ca. 1770 drawing, watercolor Yale Center for British Art |
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| Giambattista Tiepolo Adoration of the Magi before 1770 drawing Cantor Center, Stanford University |
"America, 1944: a place of easy hallucinations, especially for German-speaking refugee intellectuals, who were reduced to the role of "petitioners in mutual competition." At the same time, they were exposed to their first, brutal contact with pure industrial society, often shuddering and retreating in the face of the "mechanization of the spirit." There were several suicides in those years, and there was desolate solitude in small apartments in New York and Los Angeles. Many did not give up but became pathetic ghosts of the old Europe, relics of a culture that no one now had any use for. From this humiliating condition, Theodor W. Adorno was able to draw valuable material for his greatest book: Minima Moralia. And his moment of maximum creative strength coincided with his situation of maximum helplessness."
"But the true concreteness lay precisely in his troubled and shifting gaze as it rested on the looming objects of the New World, on scraps of sentences from newspapers, on the professional smiles of his colleagues, on the fortified cottages of horrible, happy families. Adorno revived an aphoristic form that had been Nietzsche's, then Max Horkheimer's, Ernst Bloch's, and Walter Benjamin's, and now put it to a different use, allowing him to plunge decisively into the private life of the society around him: a life of trivia that emerged already televised and that no philosopher had hitherto thought worthy of consideration."
"Adorno allowed his gaze to wander at length over these trivial things, until he saw shining through them the whole past of our culture, a landscape of catastrophes now contracted in hellish harmony and fragmented as in a psychoanalytical case history. Observing glossy advertising images or listening to the words of a popular song that carried the distorted echo of a Brahms lied, Adorno knew it was a question not of protecting "culture" from these horrors but, on the contrary, of recognizing in them the mocking origin of culture itself, finally unveiled in reverse at its end: "In their counterfeit light shines the publicity character of culture."
"For those able to grasp, through the meshes of a prodigiously dense and tense prose, the mechanism of what Adorno called "criticism of culture," Minima Moralia is a contagious book. I do not think anyone can say he has read it properly unless he has experienced it for some time as an obsession, feeling obliged to look, as though for the first time and often with paralyzing fright, at many everyday situations he had hitherto taken for granted. So eventually it becomes healthier to dismiss this obsession and its widespread intrusiveness, and perhaps even return to a more short-sighted and distracted gaze. But it is an obsession for which one remains ever grateful, and when one reopens the book, certain sentences reemerge like talismans that once helped to cross the enchanted forest. For anyone who has had the good fortune to meet them, they remain silent and charitable witnesses whose power is still intact. I should like here to record only one of these sentences, perhaps the most precise definition of art I know: "Art is magic liberated from the lie of being truth."
– from Roberto Calasso's essay, The Siren Adorno, originally published in Italian in 1976, translated by John Shepley and published in Calasso's essay collection, The Forty-Nine Steps (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life was first published in English in 1974.
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| Paul Sandby Carriage and Pair 1774 wash drawing Yale Center for British Art |
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| Johann Christian von Mannlich Hymen Mourning 1775 drawing Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |
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| Giuseppe Cades Armida gazes on sleeping Rinaldo 1785 drawing, colored chalks Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Henry Fuseli Female figure adapted to architecture 1778 drawing Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen |
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| Henry Fuseli The Shepherd's Dream 1786 wash drawing Albertina, Vienna |
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| John Flaxman "Get Thee Behind Me, Satan!" ca. 1783-87 drawing Yale Center for British Art |
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| John Flaxman Creation of the Heavens ca. 1790 wash drawing Yale Center for British Art |
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| Benjamin West The Three Sisters 1783 drawing Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City |
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| Mauritius Lowe Allegorical subject before 1793 drawing Yale Center for British Art |
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| Jordanus Hoorn Man reading late 18th century drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |