Tuesday, September 1, 2026

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1970)

Serge Vandercam
L'Echo
1970
gouache on paper
NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida


Frank Stella
Raqqa II
1970
acrylic on canvas
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Arnaldo Pomodoro
Untitled
1970
lithograph
San Jose Museum of Art, California

Robert Motherwell
Open no. 176 (in Crimson with Orange and Black Line)
1970
acrylic on canvas
Tacoma Art Museum, Washington State

Andy Warhol
Exhibition Poster
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

1970
screenprint
San Jose Museum of Art, California

Asger Jorn
Untitled
1970
lithograph
NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Patrick Heron
Interlocking Scarlet and Pink in Deep Green
1970
screenprint
Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia

James Brooks
Ashawagh
1970
lithograph
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

Walter Askin
Bruegel-Britannia
1970
screenprint
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California

Karel Appel
Looking to the Infinite
1970
lithograph
NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

John Chamberlain
Untitled
1970
urethane foam with cord
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Leonard Baskin
Blue Teasel
1970
color etching
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Ed Vebell
Art Thieves
1970
drawing
(magazine illustration)
New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut

Kenneth Josephson
Illinois
1970
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Jay DeFeo
After-Image
1970
drawing with added gouache
Menil Collection, Houston
 
Imogen Cunningham
Warning
1970
gelatin silver print
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California

from "The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning"

By all means sing of love but, if you do, 
Please make a rare old proper hullabaloo:
When ladies ask How much do you love me?
The Christian answer is così-così;
But poets are not celibate divines:
Had Dante said so, who would read his lines?
Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever,
And do not listen to those critics ever
Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books
Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks,
As though the Muse preferred her half-wit sons;
Good poets have a weakness for bad puns.

Suppose your Beatrice be, as usual, late,
And you would tell us how it feels to wait,
You're free to think, what may be even true,
You're so in love that one hour seems like two,
But write – As I sat waiting for her call,
Each second longer darker seemed than all
(Something like this but more elaborate still)
Those raining centuries it took to fill
That quarry whence Endymion's Love was torn;

From such ingenious fibs are poems born.
Then, should she leave you for some other guy,
Or ruin you with debts, or go and die,
No metaphor, remember can express
A real historical unhappiness;
Your tears have value if they make us gay;
O Happy Grief! is all sad verse can say.

– W.H. Auden (1953)