Proles

Hans Thoma
Market Scene
1889
oil on canvas
Kunsthalle Mannheim

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller
Maternal Admonition
1850
oil on panel
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Peter Fendi
The Cautious Parlormaid
1834
oil on panel
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Gotthardt Kuehl
Orphans in Lübeck
1884
oil on canvas
Galerie Neue Meister (Albertinum), Dresden

Bernhard Kretzschmar
Attic
1919
oil on canvas
Galerie Neue Meister (Albertinum), Dresden

Peter Cornelius
Boulevard Richard Lenoir, Paris
ca. 1957
C-print
Museum Folkwang, Essen

Gaetano Gandolfi
Brawl among Card-Players
ca. 1770
etching
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Rembrandt van Rijn
Woman relieving herself
1631
etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Ferdinand Laufberger
Study of a Neapolitan
ca. 1863-64
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Walter Gramatté
Portrait of a Woman
ca. 1920
pastel on paper
Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Émile Lassalle after Louis-Léopold Robert
Harvester
(the pose is associated with Antinoüs)
1843
lithograph
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques
des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

August Sander
Earthbound Woman
1912
gelatin silver print
Museum Folkwang, Essen

Laurits Andersen Ring
Women with Pram outside a Farmhouse
1906
oil on canvas
Ordrupgaard Art Museum, Copenhagen

David Teniers the Younger
Peasants making Music
ca. 1650
oil on panel
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

John Sloan
Renganeschi's Saturday Night
1912
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich
Pretzel Seller
ca. 1740
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

The Boeotians, when they had erected their trophy, taken away their own dead, rifled those of the enemy, and left a guard upon the place, returned back to Tanagra and there entered into consultation for an assault to be made on Delium.  In the meantime, a herald sent from the Athenians to require the bodies met with a herald by the way sent by the Boeotians, which turned him back by telling him he could get nothing done till himself was returned from the Athenians.  This herald, when he came before the Athenians, delivered unto them what the Boeotians had given him in charge, namely, that they had done unjustly to transgress the universal law of the Grecians, being a constitution received by them all; that the invader of another's country should abstain from all holy places in the same; that the Athenians had fortified Delium and dwelt in it, and done whatsoever else men use to do in places profane, and had drawn that water to the common use, which was unlawful for themselves to have touched, save only to wash their hands for the sacrifice; that therefore the Boeotians, both in the behalf of the god and of themselves, invoking Apollo and all the interessed spirits, did warn them to be gone and to remove their stuff out of the temple.

– from The Peloponnesian War as written by Thucydides (5th century BC) and translated by Thomas Hobbes (1628) and edited by David Grene (1959)

Allies

Tomma Abts
Untitled (Big Circle)
2015
aquatint
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Herb Aach
No. 9
1973-74
gouache on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Francesco Botticini
Three Archangels (Michael, Raphael, Gabriel) with Tobias
1470
oil on panel
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

Giuseppe Bezzuoli
St Michael Archangel
1844
oil on canvas
private collection 

Tauba Auerbach
Organize I Poster
2017
laser print and rubber stamp on paper
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Tauba Auerbach
Persevere I Poster
2017
laser print and rubber stamp on paper
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Giuseppe Abbati
Cloister
before 1868
oil on canvas
Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Florence

Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Untitled
ca. 1960
C-print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Anni Albers
Preliminary Design for Wall Hanging
1926
gouache and graphite on paper
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Otl Aicher
Realistische Weltliteratur der Gegenwart
ca. 1949
photolithograph (poster)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Dennis Ashbaugh
Agit Prop Tram #2
1974
oil on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Anne Appleby
Coyote Meadow
1999
oil paint and wax on three canvases
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Trophime Bigot
Memento Mori
ca. 1630
oil on canvas
Palazzo Barberini, Rome

Luis Cruz Azaceta
Deadly Rain
1983
acrylic on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Alice Attie
Untitled
2001
digital print
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Anna Held Audette
Scrap Metal XVII
1997
oil on canvas
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

from Journal of an Airman

There are some birds in these valleys

Who flutter round the careless

With intimate appeal,

By seeming kindness trained to snaring,

They feel no falseness.

Under the spell completely 

They circle can serenely,

And in the tricky light

The masked hill has a purer greenness.

Their flight looks fleeter.

But fowlers, O, like foxes,

Lie ambushed in the rushes.

Along the harmless tracks

The madman keeper crawls through brushwood,

Axe under oxter.

Alas, the signal given,

Fingers on trigger tighten.

The real unlucky dove

Must smarting fall away from brightness,

Its love from living.

– W.H. Auden, The Orators (1931)

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1929)

Otto Arpke
International Fur Trade Exposition, Leipzig
1929
offset print
(poster produced ahead of event)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Marianne Breslauer
Longchamp, Paris
1929
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Max Ernst
The Hundred-Headed Woman opens her August Sleeve
1929
printed paper collage
Menil Collection, Houston

Esther Gehlin
Still Life with Cod
1929
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Rockwell Kent
Night Watch
1929
wood-engraving
Seattle Art Museum

Fernand Léger
Composition with Vine
1929
oil on canvas
Seattle Art Museum

André Lhote
Three Women
1929
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

William Horace Littlefield
Boxers
1929
lithograph
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, New York

Kenneth Hayes Miller
New York Graces
1929
etching
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Pablo Picasso
Woman in Red Armchair
1929
oil on canvas
Menil Collection, Houston

Angelo Pinto
Three Lights Backstage
1929
wood-engraving
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Laurits Andersen Ring
Winter in Roskilde
1929
oil on canvas
Randers Kunstmuseum, Denmark

August Sander
Boxing champion Hein Domgörgen
portrayed by artist Heinrich Hoerle
1929
gelatin silver print
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Kurt Schwitters
Untitled
1929
collage on paper
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

William Sommer
Figure Studies
1929
watercolor on paper
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Maurice Tabard
Hand
1929
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

River Profile

Our body is a moulded river. 

                             – Novalis

Out of a bellicose fore-time, thundering

head-on collisions of cloud and rock in an

up-thrust, crevasse-and-avalanche, troll-country,

deadly to breathers,

it whelms into our picture below the melt-line,

where tarns lie frore under frowning cirques, goat-bell,

wind-breaker, fishing-rod, miner's-lamp country,

already at ease with

the mien and gestures that become its kindness,

in streams, still anonymous, still jumpable,

flows as it should through any declining country

in probing spirals.

Soon of a size to be named and the cause of

dirty in-fighting among rival agencies,

down a steep stair, penstock-and-turbine country,

it plunges ram-stam,

to foam through a wriggling gorge incised in softer

strata, hemmed between crags that nauntle heaven,

robber-baron, tow-rope, portage-way country,

nightmare of merchants. 

Disemboguing from foothills, now in hushed meanders,

now in riffling braids, it vaunts across a senile

plain, well-entered, chateau-and-cider-press country,

its regal progress 

gallanted for a while by quibbling poplars,

then by chimneys: led off to cool and launder

retort, steam-hammer, gasometer country,

it changes color. 

Polluted, bridged by girders, banked by concrete,

now it bisects a polyglot metropolis,

ticker-tape, taxi, brothel, foot-lights country,

à-la-mode always. 

Broadening or burrowing to the moon's phases,

turbid with pulverised wastemantle, on through

flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country

it scours, approaching

the tidal mark where it puts off majesty,

disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta,

punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country,

wearies to its final

act of surrender, effacement, atonement

in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled

attractive child ever dreams of, non-country,

image of death as

a spherical dew-drop of life. Unlovely

monsters, our tales believe, can be translated

too, even as water, the selfless mother

of all especials. 

– W.H. Auden (1966)

Proles

Anonymous French Artist
Men sawing Timber
17th century
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Laurits Andersen Ring
Building Watercourse at Søndersø
1885
oil on canvas
Fuglsang Kunstmuseum, Lolland, Denmark

Elias Porcelius
The Carpenter
ca. 1710
woodcut
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Wilhelm Trübner
Young Carpenter planing a Coffin
1870
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Anthon van Rappard
Cotton Worker
ca. 1890
oil on canvas
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

Anonymous German Artist
Lathe Worker
ca. 1518
woodcut
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wulfenbüttel

Stefano della Bella
Studies of Workers
ca. 1640
drawing
Yale University Art Gallery

Joseph Wagner after Jacopo Amigoni
Lamp-Lighter
1739
etching and engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Albert Renger-Patzsch
Crab Fisherman
1925
gelatin silver print
Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal

Fritz Boehle
Group of Fishermen
ca. 1898
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Ramiro Arrúe Valle
Basque Fishermen
1930
oil on panel
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau

Carl Ludvig Locher
Women gathering Nets on the Beach at Hornbæk
1884
oil on canvas
Kunsten Museum, Aalborg, Denmark

Alexander Archipenko
Gondolier
1914
gouache on paper
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

Lorenzo Bianchi and Domenico Cuciniello
Maltese Fish-Seller
ca. 1825
lithograph
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin
Kitchen Maid
ca. 1738
oil on canvas
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Claude-Joseph Bail
Far Niente
ca. 1890
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Mulhouse

For the Athenians vexing Peloponnesus, and their particular territory Laconia most of all, they thought the best way to divert them was to send an army to the confederates of the Athenians, so to vex them again.  And the rather because Perdiccas and the Chalcideans were content to maintain the army, having called it thither to help the Chalcideans in their revolt.  And because also they desired a pretence to send away part of their Helotes, for fear they should take the opportunity of the present state of affairs, the enemies lying now in Pylus, to innovate.  For they did also this further, fearing the youth and multitude of their Helotes, for the Lacedaemonians had ever many ordinances concerning how to look to themselves against the Helotes.* They caused proclamation to be made that as many of them as claimed the estimation to have done the Lacedaemonians best service in their wars should be made free; feeling them in this manner and conceiving that, as they should every one out of pride deem himself worthy to be first made free, so they would soonest also rebel against them.  And when they had thus preferred about two thousand, which also with crowns on their heads went in procession about the temples as to receive their liberty, they not long after made them away, and no man knew how they perished. 

– from The Peloponnesian War as written by Thucydides (5th century BC) and translated by Thomas Hobbes (1628) and edited by David Grene (1959)

*Helot is the general name applied to the people who cultivated the ground for the Spartans.  As the latter lived entirely in barracks till the age of thirty and even after that were closely attached to the army, the farming of their estates had to be done by others.  These farm workers were serfs, but not slaves.  They were bound to the land but could not be sold, and they were paid a proportion of produce from the land they worked.  They were of various races, being composed of the people who had owned the land when the Spartans conquered it.