Saturday, July 26, 2025

Reposeful and Unsettled

Milton Glaser
Tomato Records, New York
1978
offset-lithograph (poster)
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum


Pietro di Gottardo Gonzaga
Subterranean Mausoleum
ca. 1780-90
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Frederick Goodall
Le Bon Curé
1853
watercolor on paper
British Museum

Sidney Goodman
The Play
1963
oil on linen
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Henri Goovaerts
Académie
ca. 1901
oil on canvas
Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht

Spencer Gore
The Icknield Way
1912
oil on canvas
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Douglas Gorsline
Stood Up
1939
etching
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Adolph Gottlieb
Spray
1959
oil on canvas
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Jules-Adolphe Goupil
The Village Girl
1876
oil on canvas
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Jan van Goyen
Landscape with a Dune
1629
oil on panel
Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Gottfried Bernhard Göz
God the Father with Adam in Paradise
ca. 1750
drawing
Belvedere Museum, Vienna

Benozzo Gozzoli
Four Standing Saints with Kneeling Donors
1481
tempera on panel, transferred to canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Urs Graf the Elder
Bearer of the Standard of Canton Zug
1521
drawing
British Museum

Walter Gramatté
Sick Man with Flowers
1918
oil on canvas
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Duncan Grant
Still Life with Cyclamen
ca. 1914
oil on board
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Gravelot (Hubert-François Bourguignon)
Scene from The Maid's Tragedy
by Beaumont and Fletcher

ca. 1735-40
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Cleve Gray
Roman Wall
1981
acrylic paint and sawdust on canvas
Brooklyn Museum

     Mr. Scogan drank off what was left of his port and refilled the glass.     
     "At this very moment," he went on, "the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world.  People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest.  Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second.  After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible.  These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them?  Most certainly we do not.  We feel sympathy, no doubt; we represent to ourselves imaginatively the sufferings of nations and individuals and we deplore them.  But, after all, what are sympathy and imagination?  Precious little, unless the person for whom we feel sympathy happens to be closely involved in our affections; and even then they don't go very far.  And a good thing too; for if one had an imagination vivid enough and sympathy sufficiently sensitive really to comprehend and to feel the sufferings of other people, one would never have a moment's peace of mind.  A really sympathetic race would not so much as know the meaning of happiness.  But luckily, as I've already said, we aren't a sympathetic race.  At the beginning of the war I used to think I really suffered, through imagination and sympathy, with those who physically suffered.  But after a month or two I had to admit that, honestly, I didn't.  And yet I think I have a more vivid imagination than most.  One is always alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world."  

– Aldous Huxley, from Crome Yellow (1921)