Wednesday, July 1, 2026

Visual Preferences (20th century: 1915)

Florine Stettheimer
Flowers against Wallpaper
1915
oil on canvas
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee

Jean Pougny (Ivan Puni)
Construction Relief
1915
painted wood and tin
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

Edward Henry Potthast
The Bathers
1915
oil on canvas
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Jules Pascin
Figures and Horses
1915
watercolor and ink on paper
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

Violet Oakley
The Woman Clothed with the Sun
1915
gouache on board
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Robert Henri
Edna Smith in a Japanese Wrap
1915
oil on canvas
Indianapolis Museum of Art

Jean Heiberg
Goldfish
1915
oil on canvas
Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Sweden

Jacoba van Heemskerck
Image no. 105
1915
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Childe Hassam
Isles of Shoals
1915
oil on canvas
Portland Museum of Art, Maine

Natalia Goncharova
Costume Design for Apostle Mark in Liturgie
(for Ballets Russes, but never produced)
1915
pochoir
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Frederick Carl Frieseke
Woman arranging Flowers
1915
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Ernst Deutsch (called Dryden)
Teufelchen
1915
lithograph (poster for film)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Nils Dardel
Portrait of Ellen Roosval née Hallwyl
1915
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Virginia Keep Clark
Portrait of arts patron Mrs James Ward Thorne
1915
pastel on paper
Art Institute of Chicago

Gifford Beal
At the Hippodrome
1915
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Eugène Atget
Staircase with Ivy
1915
gelatin silver print
Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia

from Nocturne

Do squamous and squiggling fish, 
down in their fireless houses,
notice nightfall? Perhaps not.
But any grounded goer,
and all to whom feathers grant
the sky's unbounded freedom, 
alter their doings at dusk,
each obsequious to its
curiosity of kind.
The commons mild their movements
and mew all their senses, but 
there are odd balls, for instance,
the owl and the pussy-cat,
as soon as day has thestered,
increase their thinking and jaunt 
to kill or to engender.

No couple of our kindred
obey the same body-clock:
for most the law is to shut
their minds up before midnight,
but someone in the small hours,
for the money or love, is
always awake and at work.
Here young radicals plotting
to blow up a building, there
a frowning poet rifling
his memory's printer's-pie
to form some placent sentence,
and overhead wanderers
whirling hither and thither
in bellies of overbig
mosquitoes made of metal.

– W.H. Auden (1972)