Sunday, June 28, 2026

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1913)

Anonymous Austrian Artist
Schwarzgelbe Redoute
1913
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Léon Bakst
Anna Pavlova in the ballet Oriental Fantasy
(not a Ballets Russes production)
1913
watercolor on paper
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Lovis Corinth
Kegelbahn
1913
oil on canvas
Landesmuseum, Hannover

Lovis Corinth
Rider with Servant and Dog
1913
oil on canvas
Landesmuseum, Hannover

Robert Delaunay
Formes Circulaires - Lune No. 1
1913
oil on canvas
Lenbachhaus, Munich

Sonia Delaunay
Page from La Prose du Transsibérien by Blaise Cendrars
1913
letterpress with pochoir coloring
Institut Valencià d'Art Modern

Ernst Deutsch (called Dryden)
Excentric Club
1913
lithograph (poster advertising silent film)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Hans Rudi Erdt
Elegante Welt
1913
lithograph (poster advertising magazine)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Marsden Hartley
Abstraction - Blue, Yellow and Green
1913
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Erich Heckel
Women in Landscape
1913
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Robert Henri
Herself
1913
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Robert Henri
Himself
1913
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Ludwig Hohlwein
Die Kornfranck-Tante
1913
lithograph (poster for coffee substitute)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Wassily Kandinsky
Painting with White Form
1913
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Hermann Keimel
F. und A. Piringer Kostümfabrik, München
1913
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Max Klinger
Salome
1913
marble
Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal

Posthumous Letter to Gilbert White

It's rather sad we can only meet people
whose dates overlap with ours, a real shame that
you and Thoreau (we know that he read you)
never shook hands. He was, we hear, a rabid

Anti-Clerical and quick-tempered, you the 
quietest of curates, yet I think he might well have
found in you the Ideal Friend he wrote of
with such gusto, but never ran into.

Stationaries, both of you, but keen walkers,
chaste by nature and, it would seem, immune to 
the beck of worldly power, kin spirits,
who found all creatures amusive, even

the tortoise in spite of its joyless stupors,
aspected the vagrant moods of the Weather,
from the modest conduct of fogs to
the coarse belch of thunder or the rainbow's

federal arch, what fun you'd have had surveying
two rival landscapes and their migrants, noting
the pitches owls hoot on, comparing
the echo-response of dactyls and spondees.

Selfishly, I, too, would have plumbed to know you:
I could have learned so much. I'm apt to fancy
myself as a lover of Nature,
but have no right to, really. How many

birds and plants can I spot? At most two dozen.
You might, though, have found such an ignoramus
a pesky bore. Time spared you that: I
have, though, thank God, the right to re-read you. 

– W.H. Auden (1973)