Monday, January 16, 2023

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

Georges Seurat
Haymakers at Montfermeil
1882
oil on panel
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Édouard Vuillard
Child wearing a Red Scarf
1891
oil on cardboard
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Vilhelm Hammershøi
Interior
1899
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery, London

Georg Achen
Interior
1901
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Gari Melchers
Writing
ca. 1905-1909
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Thomas Eakins
William Rush carving his Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River
c1908
oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum

George Washington Lambert
The Pond
1908
oil on canvas
Leeds Art Gallery, Yorkshire

Algernon Talmage
The Mackerel Shawl
1910
oil on canvas
Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

Spencer Gore
Balcony at the Alhambra
1911-12
oil on canvas
York City Art Gallery

Pierre Bonnard
La Toilette
ca. 1914-21
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

John Lavery
Daylight Raid from My Studio Window
7 July 1917
oil on canvas
Ulster Museum, Belfast

Giorgio Morandi
Still Life
1918
oil on canvas
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Malcolm Drummond
Chelsea Public Library
1920
oil on canvas
Burton Gallery, University of Leeds

Max Ernst
Untitled Dada
ca. 1922-23
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

M. Gluck
Léonide Massine waiting for his cue
to go on stage in On with the Dance

1925
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Katherine Hartnell
Life Drawing Class
1926
oil on canvas
University College London Art Museum

from The New Intelligence

After knowledge extinguished the last of the beautiful
fires our worship had failed to prolong, we walked
back home through pedestrian daylight, to a residence

humbler than the one left behind. A door without mystery,
a room without theme. For the hour that we spend
complacent at the window overlooking the garden,

we observe an arrangement in rust and gray-green,
a vagueness at the center whose slow, persistent
movements some sentence might explain if we had time

or strength for sentences. To admit that what falls
falls solitarily, lost in the permanent dusk of the particular.
That the mind that fear and disenchantment fatten

comes to boss the world around it, morbid as the damp-
fingered guest who rearranges the cheeses the minute the host
turns to fix her a cocktail. A disease of the will, the way

false birch branches arch and interlace from which
hands dangle last leaf-parchments and a very large array
of primitive bird-shapes. Their pastel feathers shake

in the aftermath of the nothing we will ever be content
to leave the way we found it.

– Timothy Donnelly (2010)