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| Russell Cheney At Cassis 1930 oil on canvas Portland Museum of Art, Maine |
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| Samuel Wood Gaylor Union Square Fire Brigade 1930 oil on canvas Portland Museum of Art, Maine |
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| Marsden Hartley Kinsman Falls 1930 oil on canvas Portland Museum of Art, Maine |
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| Ludwig Hohlwein Lake Starnberg: 30 Minutes from Munich 1930 offset print (poster) Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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| Rockwell Kent Study for Reaching for the Nest 1930 drawing McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas |
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| Rockwell Kent Study for Reaching for the Nest 1930 drawing McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas |
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| Walt Kuhn Girl in Shako 1930 oil on canvas Wichita Art Museum, Kansas |
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| Fernand Léger Composition 1930 oil on canvas Moderna Museet, Stockholm |
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| George Luks Elsie 1930 oil on canvas Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas |
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| Alfred Maurer Still Life with Watermelon and Shrimp 1930 oil on panel McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas |
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| Piet Mondrian Portrait of a Woman 1930 oil on canvas Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands |
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| Elie Nadelman Two Women 1930 glazed terracotta Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin |
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| John Nash Jug of Flowers 1930 oil on canvas Manchester Art Gallery |
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| Jakob Nieweg Ships at the Quay of Vlissingen 1930 oil on canvas Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands |
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| Valentin Zietara Hannover 1930 lithograph (poster) Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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| Berenice Abbott Burlesk Theatre 1930 gelatin silver print Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine |
Fairground
Thumping old tunes give a voice to its whereabouts
long before one can see the dazzling archway
of colored lights, beyond which household proverbs
cease to be valid,
a ground sacred to the god of vertigo
and his cult of disarray: here jeopardy,
panic, shock, are dispensed in measured doses
by fool-proof engines.
As passive objects, packed tightly together
on Roller-Coaster or Ferris-Wheel, mortals
taste in their solid flesh the volitional
joys of a seraph.
Soon the Roundabout ends the clumsy conflict
of Right and Left: the riding mob melts into
one spinning sphere, the perfect shape performing
the perfect motion.
Mopped and mowed at, as their train worms through a tunnel,
by ancestral spooks, caressed by clammy cobwebs,
grinning initiates emerge into daylight
as tribal heroes.
Fun for Youth who knows his libertine spirit
is not a copy of Father's, but has yet to
learn that the tissues which lend it stamina,
like Mum's, are bourgeois.
Those with their wander-years behind them, who are rather
relieved that all routes of escape are spied on,
all hours of amusement counted, requiring
caution, agenda,
keep away – to be found in coigns where, sitting
in silent synods, they play chess or cribbage,
games that call for patience, foresight, manoeuvre,
like war, like marriage.
– W.H. Auden (1966)