Thursday, September 3, 2026

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1970)

Lou Stoumen
Berkeley
1970
gelatin silver print
New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut

Garry Winogrand
Untitled (Man with Birds)
1970
gelatin silver print
Dallas Museum of Art

Kenneth Josephson
New York State
1970
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Leon Levinstein
Untitled
1970
gelatin silver print
Portland Museum of Art, Maine

Leonard Baskin
Daggoo
(character in Moby Dick)
1970
lithograph
Tacoma Art Museum, Washington State

Frank Bowling
Middle Passage
1970
acrylic and aerosol paint and crayon on canvas
Menil Collection, Houston

John Clem Clarke
Untitled (Caravaggio Pastiche)
1970
lithograph
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Peter Dean
Evil Eye Drive-In
1970
oil on canvas
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

José Guerrero
Black Arches
1970
oil on canvas
Museo de Bellas Artes de Granada, Spain

Allen Harrill
Six Aligned (Plunge Series)
1970
acrylic on canvas
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Asger Jorn
Sulla Strada II
1970
lithograph
NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Luigi Lucioni
Arrangement in Blue
1970
oil on canvas
Denver Art Museum

Conrad Marca-Relli
Summer Suite
1970
paper and textile collage on panel
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Jules Olitski
Mauve/Blue with Green and Yellow
1970
screenprint
NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Thomas Algernon Weir
Parker Ranch
1970
cyanotype
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California

Fred Dasch
Flea Market
1970
C-print
Tacoma Art Museum, Washington State

from Homage to Clio

Our hill has made its submission and the green
     Swept on into the north: around me,
From morning to night, flowers duel incessantly,
     Color against color, in combats

Which they all win, and at any hour from some point else
     May come another tribal outcry
Of a new generation of birds who chirp,
     Not for effect but because chirping

Is the thing to do. More lives than I perceive
     Are aware of mine this May morning
As I sit reading a book, sharper senses
     Keep watch on an inedible patch

Of unsatisfactory smell, unsafe as
     So many areas are: to observation
My book is dead, and by observations they live
     In space, as unaware of silence

As Provocative Aphrodite or her twin,
     Virago Artemis, the Tall Sisters
Whose subjects they are. That is why, in their Dual Realm,
     Banalities can be beautiful,

Why nothing is too big or too small or the wrong
     Color, and the roar of an earthquake
Rearranging the whispers of streams a loud sound
     Not a din: but we, at haphazard

And unseasonably, are brought face to face
     By ones, Clio, with your silence. After that
Nothing is easy. We may dream as we wish
     Of phallic pillar or navel-stone

With twelve nymphs twirling about it, but pictures
     Are no help: your silence already is there
Between us and any magical centre
     Where things are taken in hand. Besides,

Are we so sorry? Woken at sun-up to hear
     A cock pronouncing himself himself
Though all his sons had been castrated and eaten,
     I was glad I could be unhappy: if

I don't know how I shall manage, at least I know
     The beast-with-two-backs may be a species
Evenly distributed but Mum and Dad
     Were not two other people. To visit

The grave of a friend, to make an ugly scene,
     To count the loves one has grown out of,
Is not nice, but to chirp like a tearless bird,
     As though no one dies in particular

And gossip were never true, unthinkable:
     If it were, forgiveness would be no use,
One-eye-for-one would be just and the innocent
    Would not have to suffer.

– W.H. Auden (1955)