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| Ludwig Refinger Marcus Curtius leaping into the Chasm 1540 oil on panel Alte Pinakothek, Munich |
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| Eduard Gärtner View of the Opera and Unter den Linden, Berlin 1845 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Georges Seurat Place de la Concorde, Winter ca. 1882-83 drawing Guggenheim Museum, New York |
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| Léon-Joseph Voirin La Place Thiers à Nancy 1887 watercolor and gouache on paper Musée Lorrain à Nancy |
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| Stuart Davis Blue Café 1928 oil on canvas Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
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| Adelaide Perry Phillip Street, Sydney ca. 1929 drawing (print study) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra |
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| Rufino Tamayo Landscape 1930 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Edward Hopper Early Sunday Morning 1930 oil on canvas Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| Lisette Model Window Reflection, Fifth Avenue, New York City 1945 gelatin silver print Tate Modern, London |
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| Nicolas de Staël Vue de Marseille ca. 1955 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| L.S. Lowry Industrial View, Lancashire 1956 oil on canvas Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick |
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| Winston Vargas Domino Players, Washington Heights, New York 1970 gelatin silver print Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC |
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| Martin Stupich Carnegie Library Demolition (Atlanta, Georgia) 1977 gelatin silver print Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC |
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| Max Yavno Los Angeles ca. 1979-80 gelatin silver print Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC |
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| Gilles Peress First Snow in Ardoyne, a Nationalist neighborhood, Belfast, Ireland 1981 gelatin silver print Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| George Nick Newbury Street Stores 1982 oil on canvas Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC |
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| Thomas Struth Schlossstrasse, Wittenberg 1991 gelatin silver print Tate Modern, London |
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| Philip-Lorca diCorcia New York 1997 C-print Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
from About the Phoenix
But in the end one tires of the high-flown.
If it were simply a matter of life or death
We should by now welcome the darkening room,
Wrinkling of linen, window at last violet,
The rosy body lax in a chair of words,
And then the appearance of unsuspected lights.
We should walk wonderingly into that other world
With its red signs pulsing and long lit lanes.
But often at nightfall, ambiguous
As the city itself, a giant jeweled bird
Comes cawing to the sill, dispersing thought
Like a birdbath, and with such final barbarity
As to wear thin at once terror and novelty.
So that a sumptuous monotony
Sets in, a pendulum of amethysts
In the shape of a bird, keyed up for ever fiercer
Flights between ardor and ashes, back and forth;
Caught in whose talons any proof of grace,
Even your face, particularly your face,
Fades, featureless in flame, or wan, a fading
Tintype of some cooling love, according
To the creature's whim. And in the end, despite
Its pyrotechnic curiosity, the process
Palls.
– James Merrill (1959)