David Wilkie Three boys with a dog ca. 1810-20 etching, drypoint Philadelphia Museum of Art |
Richard Parkes Bonington Bologna ca. 1826-27 etching Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
Lawrence Barnett Phillips Seated Angel ca. 1857-72 etching British Museum |
Émile Durandeau Les nuits de Monsieur Baudelaire 1861 lithograph from Le Boulevard British Museum |
Poem
Khrushchev is coming on the right day!
the cool
graced light
is pushed off the enormous glass piers by hard wind
and everything is tossing, hurrying on up
this
country
has everything but politesse, a Puerto Rican cab driver
says
and five different girls I see
look like Piedie
Gimbel
with her blonde hair tossing too,
as she looked
when I pushed
her little daughter on the swing on the lawn it was also
windy
last night we went to a movie and came out,
Ionesco is greater
than Beckett, Vincent said, that's what I think,
blueberry blintzes
and Khrushchev was probably being carped at
in
Washington, no
politesse
Vincent tells me about his mother's trip to Sweden
Hans tell us
about his father's life in Sweden, it sounds like Grace
Hartigan's
painting, Sweden
so I go home to bed and names drift
through my
head
Purgatorio Merchado, Gerhard Schwartz and Gaspar
Gonzales,
all unknown figures of the early morning as I
go to work
where does the evil of the year go
when September
takes New York
and turns it into ozone stalagmites
deposits of light
so I get back up
make coffee, and read François Villon, his life, so dark
New York seems blinding and my tie is blowing
up the street
I wish it would blow off
though it is cold and
somewhat warms
my neck
as the train bears Khrushchev on to Pennsylvania Station
and the light seems to be eternal
and joy seems to be inexorable
I am foolish enough always to find it in wind
– Frank O'Hara (written 17 September 1959)
Mariano Fortuny Victory: standing youth holding statuette of Winged Victory 1869 etching Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
Frans Lauwers after Alfred Stevens Portrait of a woman ca. 1880 etching British Museum |
Thomas Woolner after Theodore Blake Wigman Thomas Woolner in his studio 1883 wood-engraving from The Century Magazine British Museum |
Berthe Morisot Berthe Morisot drawing with her daughter Julie Manet 1889 drypoint British Museum |
Édouard Vuillard Intérieur aux teintures roses III 1899 lithograph British Museum |
Jean-Louis Forain Portrait of Colette Willy ca. 1900 lithograph British Museum |
Muirhead Bone Under the Pincian trees (Rome) 1911 drypoint British Museum |
Walter Sickert Mushrooms ca. 1922 etching British Museum |
Georges Barbier Mme Ida Rubinstein in La Dame aux Camélias (gown by Worth) 1923 pochoir from Gazette du Bon Ton Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
Tom Phillips Samuel Beckett (at Riverside Studios) 1984 lithograph British Museum |