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| Léopold Survage Face holding Leaf 1934 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Elmer Novotny Portrait of a Pianist 1934 oil on canvas Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Sheffield Harold Kagy Industrial #2 1934 linocut Dallas Museum of Art |
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| John Held Manhattan Skyline 1934 watercolor on paper Indianapolis Museum of Art |
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| Julio González Tête au Miroir 1934 bronze on stone base Institut Valencià d'Art Modern |
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| Lloyd Foltz Full Moon 1934 lithograph Wichita Art Museum, Kansas |
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| John Ferren Untitled 1934 oil on canvas Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas |
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| Raymond Creekmore Digging the Pit 1934 lithograph Dallas Museum of Art |
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| Alexander Calder Untitled 1934 painted and unpainted metal and painted wood Institut Valencià d'Art Modern |
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| Paul Cadmus Mother and Child 1934 etching Wichita Art Museum, Kansas |
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| Wim ten Broek Self Portrait 1934 drawing Rijksmuseum, Twenthe |
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| Michel Brodsky Portrait of artist Leonor Fini 1934 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
-Chain-Belt-Movement-Machine-Dance-Moscow-Ballet-School-1934-photogravure-Akron-Art-Museum-Ohio.jpg) |
| Margaret Bourke-White Chain-Belt Movement Machine-Dance, Moscow Ballet School 1934 photogravure Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
-Ekaterina-Dzhugashivili-mother-of-Joseph-Stalin-1934-photogravure-Akron-Art-Museum-Ohio.jpg) |
| Margaret Bourke-White Ekaterina Dzhugashvili, mother of Joseph Stalin 1934 photogravure Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Gustave Baumann The Green Gate Orchard 1934 color woodblock print Wichita Art Museum, Kansas |
-Narcisse-1934-Fresson-print-Akron-Art-Museum-Ohio.jpg) |
| Laure Albin-Guillot Narcisse 1934 fresson print Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
The Horatians
Into what fictive realms can imagination
translate you, Flaccus, and your kin? Not the courts of
Grand Opera, that galère
of lunatics, power-famished
or love-ravenous, belting out their arias,
nor the wards of Buffa, either, where abnormal
growths of self-love are excised
by the crude surgery of a
practical joke. Perhaps the only invented
story in which your appearance seems credible
is the Whodunit: I can
believe in one of you solving
a murder which has the professionals baffled,
thanks to your knowledge of local topography.
In our world all of you share
a love for some particular
place and stretch of country, a farm near Tivoli
or a Radnorshire village: what the Capital
holds out as a lure, a chance
to get into Society,
does not tempt you, who wry from crowds, traffic-noises,
blue-stockings and millionaires. Your tastes run to
small dinner-parties, small rooms,
and the tone of voice that suits them,
neither truckle nor thrasonical but softly
certain (a sound wood-winds imitate better
than strings), your most worldly wish
a genteel sufficiency of
land or lolly. Amongst those I really know, the
British branch of the family, how many have
found in the Anglican Church
your Maecenas who enabled
a life without cumber, as pastors adjective
to rustic flocks, as organists in trollopish
cathedral towns. Then, in all
labyrinthine economies
there are obscure nooks into which Authority
never pokes a suspicious nose, embusqué havens
for natural bachelors
and political idiots,
Zoological and Botanical Gardens,
museum-basements displaying feudal armor
or old coins, there, too, we find
you among the custodians.
Some of you have written poems, usually
short ones, and some kept diaries, seldom published
till after your deaths, but most
make no memorable impact
except on your friends and dogs. Enthusiastic
Youth writes you off as cold, who cannot be found on
barricades, and never shoot
either yourselves or your lovers.
You thought well of your Odes, Flaccus, and believed they
would live, but knew, and have taught your descendants to
say with you: "As makers go,
compared with Pindar or any
of the great foudroyant masters who don't ever
amend, we are, for all our polish, of little
stature, and, as human lives,
compared with authentic martyrs
like Regulus, of no account. We can only
do what it seems to us we were made for, look at
this world with a happy eye
but from a sober perspective."
– W.H. Auden (1968)