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| Nicholas Krushenick Boston Tea Party 1975 screenprint Dallas Museum of Art |
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| Alden Mason Seed Shaker 1975 oil on canvas Tacoma Art Museum, Washington State |
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| James McGarrell Untitled 1975 lithograph NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida |
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| Robert Motherwell Hermitage 1975 lithograph and screenprint Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia |
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| Claes Oldenburg Inverted Q above and below Ground (study for sculpture) 1975 lithograph, etching and aquatint Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Erik Ortvad Kanalsinmarshan 1975 lithograph NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida |
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| Philip Pearlstein Model with Legs Up 1975 oil on linen Akron Art Museum, Ohio |
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| Eleanor Prager Tree of Enlightenment 1975 wood and metal assemblage San Jose Museum of Art, California |
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| Ben Schonzeit Rhubarb 1975 acrylic on canvas Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington |
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| George Segal Embracing Couple 1975 plaster relief Walker Art Center, Minneapolis |
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| Aaron Siskind Cuzco 14 1975 gelatin silver print Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York |
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| Rudolf Harry Staffel Light Gatherer Vase 1975 porcelain Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington |
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| Erika Stone Field of Tulips 1975 gelatin silver print New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut |
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| Karen Truax Loreli Days 1975 hand-colored gelatin silver print Portland Museum of Art, Maine |
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| Andy Warhol Ladies and Gentlemen 1975 screenprint North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh |
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| Andy Warhol Mick Jagger #9 1975 screenprint NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida |
The Shield of Achilles
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot.
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
– W.H. Auden (1952)