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| Pedro Pérez Monsters that will prevent people like Sydney Tillim from becoming Famous Artists 1976 oil on canvas NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida |
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| Pat Andrea Lighting a Cigarette in Buenos Aires 1976 oil on panel Kunstmuseum, The Hague |
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| Tom Wesselmann Smoker 1976 screenprint Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami |
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| Beth Van Hoesen Peony 1976 aquatint, etching and drypoint New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut |
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| Harold Altman Paths, Buttes-Chaumont 1976 color etching Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee |
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| Kjell Anderson Still Life 1976 oil on canvas Moderna Museet, Stockholm |
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| James Brooks Hover 1976 acrylic on canvas Portland Museum of Art, Maine |
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| Roger Brown Museum without Ceiling 1976 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago |
-Wrapped-Monument-to-Cristobal-Colon-Project-for-Barcelona-1976-collage-crayon-and-graphite-on-board-Lowe-Art-Museum-University-of-Miami.jpeg) |
| Christo (Christo Javacheff) Wrapped Monument to Cristobal Colon - Project for Barcelona 1976 collage, crayon and graphite on board Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami |
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| Louise Nevelson Untitled 1976 painted wood and paper Walker Art Center, Minneapolis |
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| Graham Sutherland Le Tour des Oiseaux 1976 lithograph Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami |
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| June Harwood A-2 (Emergence Series) 1976 acrylic on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Roy Lichtenstein The Violin 1976 oil on canvas Denver Art Museum |
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| Robert Rauschenberg Artist's Rights Today 1976 lithograph Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas |
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| Pieter Stoop Untitled 1976 oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Twenthe |
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| Robert Indiana The Golden Future of America 1976 screenprint (poster) Dallas Museum of Art |
from Memorial for the City
II
Alone in a room Pope Gregory whispered his name
While the Emperor shone on a centreless world
From wherever he happened to be; the New City rose
Upon their opposition, the yes and no
Of a rival allegiance; the sword, the local lord
Were not all; there was home and Rome;
Fear of the stranger was lost on the way to the shrine.
The facts, the acts of the City bore a double meaning:
Limbs became hymns; embraces expressed in jest
A more permanent tie; infidel faces replaced
The family foe in the choleric's nightmare;
The children of water parodied in their postures
The infinite patience of heaven,
Those born under Saturn felt the gloom of the day of doom.
Scribes and innkeepers prospered; suspicious tribes combined
To rescue Jerusalem from a dull god,
And disciplined logicians fought to recover thought
From the eccentricities of the private brain
For the Sane City; framed in her windows, orchards, ports,
Wild beasts, deep rivers and dry rocks
Lay nursed on the smile of a merciful Madonna.
In a sandy province Luther denounced as obscene
The machine that so smoothly forgave and saved
If paid; he announced to the Sinful City a grinning gap
No rite could cross; he abased her before the Grace:
Henceforth division was also to be her condition,
Her conclusions were to include doubt,
Her loves were to bear with her fear; insecure, she endured.
Saints tamed, poets acclaimed the raging herod of the will;
The groundlings wept as on a secular stage
The grand and the bad went to ruin in thundering verse;
Sundered by reason and treason the City
Found invisible ground for concord in measured sound,
While wood and stone learned the shameless
Games of man, to flatter, to show off, be pompous, to romp.
Nature was put to the question in the Prince's name;
She confessed, what he wished to hear, that she had no soul;
Between his scaffold and her coldness the restrained style,
The ironic smile became the worldly and devout,
Civility a city grown rich: in his own snob way
The unarmed gentleman did his job
As a judge to her children, as a father to her forests.
In a national capital Mirabeau and his set
Attacked mystery, the packed galleries roared
And history marched to the drums of a clear idea,
The aim of the Rational City, quick to admire,
Quick to tire: she used up Napoleon and threw him away;
Her pallid affected heroes
Began their hectic quest for the prelapsarian man.
The deserts were dangerous, the waters rough, their clothes
Absurd but, changing their Beatrices often,
Sleeping little, they pushed on, raised the flag of the Word
Upon lawless spots denied or forgotten
By the fear or the pride of the Glittering City;
Guided by hated parental shades,
They invaded and harrowed the hell of her natural self.
Chimeras mauled them, they wasted away with the spleen,
Suicide picked them off, sunk off Cape Contemplation,
Lost on the Tosspot Seas, wrecked on the Gibbering Isles
Or trapped in the ice of despair at the Soul's Pole,
They died, unfinished, alone; but now the forbidden,
The hidden, the wild outside were known:
Faithful without faith, they died for the Conscious City.
– W.H. Auden (1949)