Sunday, January 15, 2023

The Painted Rückenfigur ("back-figure") - II

Pierre Subleyras
Charon ferrying the Shades
ca. 1735-40
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Giandomenico Tiepolo
Promenade
ca. 1791
detached fresco
(originally in the Tiepolo villa at Zianigo)
Ca' Rezzonico, Venice

Francisco Goya
The Forge
ca. 1819
oil on canvas
Frick Collection, New York

Caspar David Friedrich
Woman at a Window
(Caroline Friedrich, the artist's wife)
1822
oil on canvas
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

William Etty
Candaules, King of Lydia,
shews his Wife by stealth to Gyges as she goes to Bed

ca. 1830
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

Frits Guldbrandsen
A Student's Room
ca. 1838
oil on paper, mounted on panel
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

Martinus Rørbye
Citadel Ramparts, Copenhagen by Moonlight
1839
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Honoré Daumier
The Bathers
ca. 1846-48
oil on panel
Burrell Collection, Glasgow

Edgar Degas
Seaside Riders
ca. 1860
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Hans von Marées
The Orange Picker
1873
oil on canvas
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

William Morris Hunt
The Bathers
1877
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Henri de Braekeleer
Man at a Window
ca. 1873-76
oil on canvas
Musée Fin de Siècle, Brussels

Paul Cézanne
Bather
ca. 1879-82
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Girl by the Sea
ca. 1882
oil on canvas
Neue Pinakothek, Munich

Jean-Léon Gérôme
A Roman Slave Market
ca. 1884
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Peder Severin Krøyer
Summer Evening on the Beach at Skagen
1884
pastel
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
 
from Association Copy

            Lynda Hull

Who can help the heart, which is grand and full
of gestures? I had been on my way out.
He was rearranging his bookshelves
when, in an approximation of tenderness,
he handed me, like the last of the sweet potatoes
at Thanksgiving, like a thing he wanted
but was willing to share, the rediscovered book –
he'd bought it years ago in a used bookstore
in Chicago. Levine's poems, with your signature inside.

That whole year I spent loving him, something splendid
as lemons, sour and bright and leading my tongue
toward new language, was on the shelf. These
weren't your own poems, autographed, a stranger's
souvenir – we'd spent vain months leafing through
New York stacks for your out-of-print collections – but you'd cared
about this book, or cared enough to claim it, your name
looped across the title page as if to say, Please.
This is mine, This book is mine. Though you sold it.
Or someone else did when you died.

– Camille Dungy (2011)