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| Franz Kline Orange Outline 1955 oil on paper, mounted on canvas North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh |
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| Le Corbusier The Open Hand 1955 lithograph Art Institute of Chicago |
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| George Platt Lynes Man in T-Shirt 1955 gelatin silver print Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia |
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| Joan Mitchell City Landscape 1955 oil on linen Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Frank Paulin Woman with Bible 1955 gelatin silver print Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami |
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| Francis Bacon Head in Grey 1955 oil on canvas Walker Art Center, Minneapolis |
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| James Brooks Album Art for Juilliard String Quartet 1955 offset print Dallas Museum of Art |
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| Lucien Clergue Young Acrobats, Arles, France 1955 gelatin silver print Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami |
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| Freddy Dosh Cityscape with Cathedral 1955 oil on board Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands |
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| Max Ernst Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 1955 oil on panel Menil Collection, Houston |
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| Robert Frank Hoboken City Fathers 1955 gelatin silver print Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Grace Hartigan Interior with Mexican Doll 1955 oil on canvas North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh |
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| Robert Rauschenberg Jasper, Studio, NYC #6 1955 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
-Allard-Pierson-Museum-Amsterdam.jpg) |
| Jack de Rijk Those Safety Glasses Were Not Useless 1955 lithograph (poster in Dutch) Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam |
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| Larry Rivers Berdie in Blue Tea Towel 1955 oil on canvas Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York |
-New-Britain-Museum-of-American-Art-Connecticut.jpeg) |
| Amos Sewell Circuit Breaker 1955 oil on board (magazine illustration) New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut |
from Dichtung und Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem)
XXXVIII
Do I love You? I could answer No with a certainty that I was speaking the truth on condition that you were someone in whom I took so little interest that it would never occur to me to ask myself the question; but there is no condition which would allow me to answer Yes with certainty. Indeed, I am inclined to believe that the more closely my feelings might approximate to the feeling which would make Yes the true answer, the more doubtful I should become. (Were you to ask: – "Do you love me?" – I should be readier, I believe, to answer Yes, if I knew this to be a lie.)
XXXIX
Can I imagine I love when in fact I do not? Certainly. Can I imagine that I do not hate when in fact I do? Certainly. Can I imagine I only hate when in fact I both hate and love? Yes, that is possible too. But could I imagine that I hated when in fact I did not? Under what circumstances would I have a motive for deceiving myself about this?
XL
Romantic Love: I do not need to have experienced this myself to give a fairly accurate description, since for centuries the notion has been one of the main obsessions of Western Culture. Could I imagine its counter-notion – Romantic Hate? What would be its conventions? Its vocabulary? What would a culture be like in which this notion was as much an obsession as that of Romantic Love is in our own? Supposing I were to experience it myself, should I be able to recognize it as Romantic Hate?
XLI
Hatred tends to exclude from consciousness every thought except that of the Hated One; but love tends to enlarge consciousness; the thought of the Beloved acts like a magnet, surrounding itself with other thoughts. Is this one reason why a happy love poem is rarely so convincing as an unhappy one: the happy lover seems continually to be forgetting his beloved to think about the universe?
– W.H. Auden (1959)