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| Mark Gertler Violin Case and Flowers 1930 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Paul Nash Blue House on the Shore ca. 1930-31 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Jean Arp Constellation according to the Laws of Chance ca. 1930 painted wood Tate Gallery |
The Skyscraper
San Francisco Telephone Building
What are you building up there so high?
I am lifting a flower up into the sky.
Did ever a lily so lithe and neat
Grow to the sun from a stone street?
See how the carven leaves reach out,
The arched petals curve and sprout.
For all the steel that holds it true,
It leans to wind as tulips do.
It leans and smiles securely down
On the low crawling humpbacked town.
Well it may, for it reaches up
To the sun, and catches the sun in its cup.
Your lily is monstrous, foul, impure:
It lives on men who laugh and endure;
It steals the sun from a hundred lives.
But how it basks, and how it thrives!
The vividest flowers are nourished on men –
Write that down with your pious pen.
Let mankind have the gods he would,
He will find they all need human blood.
For all of beauty men may gain
They render the salt blood of pain.
Man will burn his flesh like a tree
If the fire sets his spirit free.
– Elisa Gidlow (1930)
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| Alice Neel Kenneth Doolittle 1931 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Gerald Leslie Brockhurst Portrait of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll ca. 1931 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Eileen Agar The Autobiography of an Embryo 1933-34 oil on panel Tate Gallery |
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| Jesse Dale Cast The Windmill, Clapham Common 1934 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
The Ballad of Santa Monica
Suggested by a local press item
At Santa Monica upon the seashore
There is an overwhelming sound of water.
The waves heave twice, and terribly, before
They throw the ocean on the seashore,
And drag it back again in foamy slaughter.
At Santa Monica above the seabowers
The mountains are remarkably fine,
And full of castles made of rosy towers,
And local mansions of imported design
Sometimes obscured by a discerning vine.
At Santa Monica upon the seashore
One day a Mr. Samuel Wilde came down
Quite to the seething edge of all the roar
Amid the gulls and garbage of the bright seashore,
Turning a sad face back to the pretty town.
In his right hand he led with tenderness
His elder sister and her name was Norah,
And she was eighty-seven, more or less,
Who viewed the bulging ocean with distress
Dash up elastic kelp and slimy flora.
In his left hand at Santa Monica
He led another sister, just one more.
She was his junior, mild and eighty-four.
When Samuel said, "Come, come, Veronica,"
She asked, "Dear brother, does God own the seashore?"
Norah said no word, was looking straight ahead
As if she could see clear to Honolulu,
Or some sweet island where canned soup and bread
Grew tropically free, and everybody led
Lives without sorrow under parasols of blue.
At Santa Monica, upon the expensive seashore,
In Samuel's pocket wrapped in neat manilla
Were certain legal papers, and they bore
The names of all these three, and then one more
Referring to a mortgage on a modest villa.
There they had lived, and it was good as some
Others in sight of better, bigger, whiter fronts,
All mortgaged to the plumbing, all called "home."
At any rate, it had a pretty garden once,
With belled hibiscus and mesembryanthemum.
But by the loud Pacific (and the same seashore)
On Samuel, Norah and Veronica
Disaster fell and worse was yet in store.
The principal was due, the bank was at the door,
They must lose their bit of home in Santa Monica.
Their little stocks and bonds, like flowers in drought,
Simply shrank and shed. Beyond a doubt
There was a way to figure this thing out;
But fragile after sums, their poor Veronica
Gently lost her mind at Santa Monica.
They could not live on air, it was all they had,
Fresh and plentiful on the fine seashore.
The company turned the lights off, "Well, it's sad,
Girls, sad," said Samuel. Then the gas. "I'm glad
The food was cooked and eaten long before."
And he was deeply desperate. But Norah
Wept no tear and would not hear of any
Word like charity. "They feed so many,"
Sam said. "Clean pride is better than a dirty penny,"
Said she, watching the wet waves change to white angora.
At Santa Monica upon the seashore
One day a Mr. Samuel Wilde came down
Quite to the seething edge of all the roar
Amid the gulls and garbage of the bright seashore,
Turning a sad face back to the pretty town.
In his right hand and in his left he led
His two dear sisters, and they came along
A little dazed to hear the words he said.
But this one smiled out loud and that one looked ahead,
And each agreed that Sam could do no wrong.
And straight into the terror of the ocean
He led his sisters by their meagre wrists,
Murmuring words of courage and devotion,
"Come, girls, come, girls," as Norah trips and twists
And nearly falls, and clenches her blue fists.
"Come, dears, my little sisters, for the shore
Does not belong to us, and we trespass.
If I were younger –" he screamed above the roar –
"I'd pay the taxes and turn on the gas
And boot the banker out of the back door.
"But I am only –" there the cold Pacific
Broke in upon his words and finished them,
Making his observation more specific,
Showing uplifted on a lunge terrific
An old man drowning, and his name was Sam.
Norah went under with a jerk and cry
But did not lose that Honolulu stare
With both her eyes quite equal at the sky.
She may eventually have got there
If she was ever washed up anywhere.
And next that aged child, the sweet Veronica,
Died before she drowned; and that was kind
Of heaven to stop her heart, having stopped her mind.
She floated, looking tender and refined,
And rested on the beach at Santa Monica.
And there in safety on the bright seashore
The deed was found reposing on the land,
Quite dry and legal, in a good rubber band.
And Sam had something in return, he bore
An opal weed the wave laid in his hand.
– Hildegarde Flanner (1934)
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| Carel Weight L’Après-midi d’une ouvrière ca, 1935 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| John Piper Abstract I 1935 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| John Piper Littlestone-on-Sea 1936 coloured paper collage and Indian ink on paper Tate Gallery |
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| Henri Matisse Draped Nude 1936 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
Silent Intimacy
The lovely ease of flowering
And fruiting of the trees
Dreams through the old years,
That we may read therein
The civility of Nature's career.
Though in Nature there is no pity,
No answer and no memory,
One imperial afternoon is enough
To hold the remembered light
Of our years, now lost and dim.
– Bunichi Kagawa (1936)
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| Matthew Smith Winter in Provence ca. 1937 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Piet Mondrian Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red 1937-42 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Lionel Wendt Untitled ca. 1934-44 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
Poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)