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| Lucas Samaras Photo-Transformation 1973 dye diffusion print National Gallery of Australia, Canberra |
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| Alice Neel Stephen Brown 1973 oil on canvas Denver Art Museum |
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| Norman Laliberté Mirror, Mirror 1973 screenprint Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec |
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| Jean Charlot Bamboo Player 1973 screenprint San Diego Museum of Art |
-1973-mink-lined-witih-silk-Agnes-Etherington-Art-Centre-Kingston-Ontario.jpg) |
| Edmond Creed Mink Stole 1973 mink pelts lined with silk Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario |
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| Michael Snow Chords 1973 lithograph Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick |
-Mersey-Yellow-1973-screenprint-National-Gallery-of-Australia-Canberra.jpg) |
| Alun Leach-Jones Mersey Yellow 1973 screenprint National Gallery of Australia, Canberra |
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| Ludwig Sander Untitled 1973 screenprint National Gallery of Australia, Canberra |
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| Dorothy Thornhill Ari Reading 1973 drawing Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney |
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| Richard Hamilton Picasso's Meninas 1973 etching, aquatint, engraving and drypoint Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane |
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| Rennie Ellis Boneless Mutton 1973 gelatin silver print Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide |
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| George A. Tice Houses and Watertowers, New Jersey 1973 gelatin silver print Dallas Museum of Art |
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| William Bowyer Garden Door 1973 oil on canvas Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, British Columbia |
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| Fred Freeman Battle of Salamis 1973 watercolor on paper (book illustration) New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut |
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| John Seery East 1973 acrylic on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra |
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| Robert Motherwell Harvest with Two White Stripes 1973 lithograph, pochoir and collage National Gallery of Australia, Canberra |
from New Year Letter
How hard it is to set aside
Terror, concupiscence and pride,
Learn who and where and how we are,
The children of a modest star,
Frail, backward, clinging to the granite
Skirts of a sensible old planet,
Our placid and suburban nurse
In Sitter's* swelling universe,
How hard to stretch imagination
To live according to our station.
To live according to our station.
For we are all insulted by
The mere suggestion that we die
Each moment and that each great I
Is but a process in a process
Within a field that never closes;
As proper people find it strange
As proper people find it strange
That we are changed by what we change,
That no event can happen twice
And that no two existences
Can ever be alike; we'd rather
Be perfect copies of our father,
Be perfect copies of our father,
Prefer our idées fixes to be
True of a fixed Reality.
No wonder, then, we lose our nerve
And blubber when we should observe:
And blubber when we should observe:
The patriots of an old idea,
No longer sovereign this year,
Get angry like Labellière,**
Who, finding no invectives hurled
Against a topsy-turvy world
Would right it, earned a quaint renown
By being buried upside down;
Unwilling to adjust belief,
Go mad in a fantastic grief
Where no adjustment need be done,
Like Sarah Whitehead, the Bank Nun,***
Where no adjustment need be done,
Like Sarah Whitehead, the Bank Nun,***
For, loving a live brother, she
Wed an impossibility,
Pacing Threadneedle Street in tears,
Wed an impossibility,
Pacing Threadneedle Street in tears,
She watched one door for twenty years,
Expecting, what she dared not doubt,
Her hanged embezzler to walk out.
– W.H. Auden (1940)
*cosmologist Willem de Sitter (1872-1934)
**eccentric Peter Labellière (1725-1800)
***ghost said to haunt the Bank of England