Aqueous

James Tissot
Seated Woman
1873
watercolor and gouache on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Amedeo Modigliani
Caryatid
1914
gouache and ink on paper
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Charles Demuth
Vaudeville Musicians
1917
watercolor on paper
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Henri-Eugène Callot
Surf and Rocks
ca. 1920
gouache on paper
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Georges Valmier
Fugue
1920
watercolor, gouache, ink and collage on paper
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Alexandra Exter
Composition
ca. 1921
gouache on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Jacques Lipchitz
Study for Sacrifice
ca. 1947
watercolor and gouache on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Albert Swinden
Abstraction
1952
gouache on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Béla Kádár
Music
before 1955
gouache on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Jean-Paul Riopelle
Untitled
1955
watercolor, gouache and ink on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Georges Noël
La Flèche
1963
gouache on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Alexander Calder
Harlequin's Dream
1963
gouache on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Geneviève Claisse
No.3 ADN (Jaune, Noir, Blanc)
1971
gouache on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

A.R. Penck
Untitled
1980
gouache on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Anna Andreeva
Moscow Olympics
1980
gouache on paper (design for children's textile)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Mary Heilmann
Big Bill
1987
gouache and acrylic on canvas
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Amy Sillman
Somewhere through although sometimes
1997
gouache on paper
Museum of Modern Art, New York

from The Last Man

SCENE: the abyss of Space: Ambrosius and Cynthia in the car, returning to the earth

Ambrosius:  O what a deep delight it is to cleave,

                    Out-darting thought, above all sight and sound,

                    And sweep the ceiling of the universe,

                    Thus with our locks!  How it does mad the heart,

                    How dances it along the living veins,

                    Like hot and steaming wine!  How my eyes ache

                    With gazing on its mighty vacancy!

– Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1825)

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)

Lord Arundel's Collection

Simon de Passe
Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel
1616
engraving
British Museum

The portrait (below) copied to produce the engraved likeness above was painted around 1612-13 when Lord Arundel would have been in his early twenties.  An attribution of that painting to the well-known Michiel van Miereveld has long been rejected, and there have been no new suggestions.  Scholars cannot examine the panel because they don't know where it is – or if it has even survived since it was last recorded in the early twentieth century. 

Anonymous Artist
Thomas Howard, Early of Arundel
ca. 1612-13
oil on panel
location unknown

Anonymous Artist
Alethea Talbot, Countess of Arundel
1619
oil on canvas
Ingestre Hall, Staffordshire

Peter Paul Rubens
Alethea Talbot, Countess of Arundel with Retinue
1620
oil on canvas
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Peter Paul Rubens
Alethea Talbot, Countess of Arundel
ca. 1620
oil on canvas
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona

Anthony van Dyck
Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel
1620-21
oil on canvas
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Daniel Mytens
Alethea Talbot, Countess of Arundel
before an Art Gallery at Arundel House in the Strand
ca. 1618
oil on canvas
National Portrait Gallery, London

Lady Arundel (above) with a partial view of one of the new-built art galleries at Arundel House.  She participated most actively in the acquisition and display of paintings, it is said, taking less interest in the statues and carved gems that fascinated Arundel himself.  Mytens painted him gesturing toward a display space for the ancient marbles he had exerted himself to obtain.  Through court posts Arundel controlled both commercial and political agents traveling in the Mediterranean and charged the most trusted with scouring out and purchasing such rarities for him – in Italy, in Greece and especially on the Ionian coast of Turkey where there had as yet been little competition from other antiquity hunters.   

Daniel Mytens
Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel
before an Art Gallery at Arundel House in the Stran
ca. 1618
oil on canvas
National Portrait Gallery, London

Peter Paul Rubens
Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel
ca. 1629-30
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Wenceslaus Hollar after Anthony van Dyck
Alethea Talbot, Countess of Arundel
and her daughter-in-law Lady Elizabeth Stuart
ca. 1636
etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Wenceslaus Hollar after Anthony van Dyck
Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel
and his son Henry, Lord Maltravers
ca. 1636
etching
Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg

Anthony van Dyck
Earl and Countess of Arundel with Children and Grandchildren
ca. 1631-32
drawing
British Museum

workshop of Anthony van Dyck
Portrait of the Earl and Countess of Arundel
ca. 1639-40
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Wenceslaus Hollar after Anthony van Dyck
Alethea Talbot, Countess of Arundel
1646
etching
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Philip Fruytiers adapted after Anthony van Dyck
Grandchildren of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel
presenting him with Arms to lead the Scottish Campaign
1639
oil on copper
Arundel Castle, West Sussex

The Earl and Countess are seated on a dais beneath a cloth of state.  On the wall behind the family group two Holbein portraits from the Earl's collection can be identified.  They represent two famous ancestors – the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (left) and his father, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk (right).  Both had withered under the elderly wrath of Henry VIII.  

Wenceslaus Hollar
Equestrian Portrait of the Earl of Arundel leading the Scottish Campaign
1639
etching and letterpress
(broadside)
Royal Collection, Windsor

When Charles I and the Scots Covenanters decided to go to war with each other in 1639, Lord Arundel was drawn in as well.  His status as hereditary Earl-Marshal of England led the King to appoint him Lord-General of the Army, though Arundel was by then well over fifty and with no military experience.  Hollar did his best, depicting the Earl in armour and on horseback in the center of a broadside promoting the King's cause (above).  Charles himself (with little more military experience than Arundel) rode north as well, accompanying the army, but from first to last this expensive expedition accomplished nothing.  The campaign itself was brief and inconclusive.  Hostilities were, as the saying goes, renewed the next year.  But by then Arundel evidently had found ways to opt out.  

François Dieussart
Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel
1637
marble
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

There is a story that Lord Arundel sent diplomatic inquiries to Gianlorenzo Bernini in Rome about the possibility of having his own portrait sculpted.  He would have known the flamboyant marble bust of King Charles by Bernini displayed at court (later destroyed in a fire) which had been modeled not from life but from portraits by Van Dyck sent over to Rome.  Arundel must have hoped for something similar, but the press of papal and royal commissions did not permit Bernini to accept.  Instead he is supposed to have recommended his former pupil François Dieussart, whose impressive bust of Arundel has come to rest in Oxford alongside the best pieces from the Earl's sculpture collection.