Showing posts with label aquatints. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aquatints. Show all posts

Thursday, July 30, 2026

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1944)

Milton Avery
The Baby
1944
oil on canvas
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio

Eugene Berman
Backdrop Design for Danses Concertantes by George Balanchine
1944
watercolor and gouache on paper
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Arshile Gorky
How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life
1944
oil on canvas
Seattle Art Museum

Hans Hofmann
Untitled
1944
gouache on paper
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Walt Kuhn
Acrobat in White and Silver
1944
oil on canvas
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Jacques Lipchitz
The Road to Exile
1944
etching, engraving and aquatint
Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia

Barbara Morgan
Berenice Abbott with a Cat
1944
gelatin silver print
Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia

Max Weber
Woman Carrying Picture
1944
oil on canvas
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Robert Motherwell
The Painter
1944
oil paint, crayon and collage on canvas
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Isamu Noguchi
Remembrance
1944
bronze
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Carl-Henning Pedersen
Untitled
1944
lithograph
NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Jackson Pollock
Untitled
1944
drawing
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Birger Sandzén
Autumn (Smoky Hill River, Kansas)
1944
oil on canvas, mounted on panel
Tacoma Art Museum

Houghton Cranford Smith
Near Los Andes
1944
oil on canvas
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

William Sommer
Portrait of Miss Eunice Merton
1944
watercolor on paper
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Paul Bough Travis
Still Life
1944
oil on panel
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

from Dichtung und Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem)

                                                              I
Expecting your arrival tomorrow, I find myself thinking I love You: then comes the thought – I should like to write a poem which would express exactly what I mean when I think these words.

                                                              II
Of any poem written by someone else, my first demand is that it be good (who wrote it is of secondary importance); of any poem written by myself, my first demand is that it be genuine, recognizable, like my handwriting, as having been written, for better or worse, by me. (When it comes to his own poems, a poet's preferences and those of his readers often overlap but seldom coincide.) 

                                                              III
But this poem which I should now like to write would not only have to be good and genuine: if it is to satisfy me, it must also be true.
     I read a poem by someone else in which he bids a tearful farewell to his beloved: the poem is good (it moves me as other good poems do) and genuine (I recognize the poet's "handwriting"). Then I learn from a biography that, at the time he wrote it, the poet was sick to death of the girl but pretended to weep in order to avoid hurt feelings and a scene. Does this information affect my appreciation of his poem? Not in the least: I never knew him personally and his private life is no business of mine. Would it affect my appreciation if I had written the poem myself? I hope so. 

– W.H. Auden (1959)

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

Epic

Anonymous Swiss Artist after Jacques-Louis David
Paris and Helen
ca. 1820
enamel on gold
(top of snuffbox)
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Johann Balthazar Probst after Victor Honoré Janssens
Wrath of Achilles
1721
etching
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Ludwig von Schwanthaler
Hector and Andromache
1838
drawing
(sculpture group by von Schwanthaler)
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Virgil Solis
Battle between Greeks and Trojans
ca. 1550-60
woodcut
(illustration to Ovid's Metamorphoses)
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wulfenbüttel

Johann Balthazar Probst after Victor Honoré Janssens
Achilles mourning Patroclus
1721
etching
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Pierre Courteys
Battle before the Walls of Troy
before 1586
enamel on copper
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Johann Balthazar Probst after Victor Honoré Janssens
Achilles dragging the Corpse of Hector
1721
etching
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Eberhard Siegfried Henne
Priam supplicating Achilles
ca. 1800
etching
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel

Anonymous German Artist
The Trojan Horse
ca. 1464
drawing, with added watercolor
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Pierre Courteys
The Trojan Horse
before 1586
enamel on copper
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Virgil Solis
Ajax disputing with Odysseus over the Armour of Achilles
ca. 1550-60
woodcut
(illustration to Ovid's Metamorphoses)
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel

Max Klinger
Cassandra
ca. 1903
marble (partly painted)
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Ancient Greek Culture in South Italy
Cassandra seated on Altar
350 BC
terracotta statuette
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Johann Heinrich Lips after Johann Heinrich Meyer
Ajax seizing Cassandra at the Altar of Athena
1794
aquatint
Graphische Sammlung, Zentralbibliothek Zürich

Samuel Bottschild
Aeneas carrying Anchises out of Burning Troy
ca. 1690
etching
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel

Gérard de Lairesse
Venus presenting the Armour of Vulcan to Aeneas
1668
oil on canvas
Museum Mayer van der Bergh, Antwerp

For as soon as the Greeks looked at the Egyptian figure type from the aspect of an art which wants to "convince," it undoubtedly raised the question why it looks unconvincing.  It is the reaction we express when we speak of its "rigid posture."  It might be argued that this reaction itself is due to our Greek education; it was the Greeks who taught us to ask "How does the statue stand?" or even "Why does he stand like that?"  Applied to a pre-Greek work of art, it may be senseless to ask this question.  The Egyptian statue does not represent a man standing rigidly or a man standing at ease – it is concerned with the what, not with the how.  To ask for more might have struck an Egyptian artist as it would strike us if someone inquired the age or mood of the king on the chessboard.  

We have no early documents to prove that the Greeks did begin to ask such "inappropriate" questions, but later texts illustrate the fact that from a new point of view, Egyptian art provoked such misunderstanding.  We have seen, after all, that Plato considered that Egyptian reliefs represented certain sanctified postures.  We also know that Heliodorus puzzled his mind over why the Egyptians rendered their gods with closed feet and that he suggested this was intended to symbolize their swiftness.  But the most telling document of this change of attitude toward the symbolic image concerns not an Egyptian but an archaic Greek work and the way it was reinterpreted in a narrative context in a later period.  We know from Philostratus' life of Apollonius that there was an archaic statue of one Milo in Olympia, standing on a disk with his two feet close together; in his left hand he grasped a pomegranate; the fingers of his right hand were extended and held tightly together.  "The people of Olympia thought that these features showed Milo to have been so inflexible and firm that he could never be induced to budge from the spot where he stood; and this is the meaning of the clenched fingers . . . and why they look as if they could not be separated."  Apollonius knew better.  He told his guides that these puzzling traits were due to the archaic style of the sculpture.  

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)

Saturday, July 18, 2026

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1932)

Milton Avery
Portrait of Annette Kaufman
1932
oil on panel
Portland Art Museum, Oregon

Max Beckmann
Gypsy Girl II (Ilonka)
1932
oil on canvas
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Karl Blossfeldt
Bryonia alba
1932
photogravure
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Pierre Bonnard
White Interior
1932
oil on canvas
Musée de Grenoble

James Brooks
Self Portrait
1932
oil on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art

Paul Citroen
Self Portrait with Camera
1932
gelatin silver print
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Jean Dunand
Self Portrait
1932
mosaic of stone and glass tiles
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Arvid Fougstedt
The Balcony
1932
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Don Freeman
Ballet from Band Wagon
1932
lithograph
Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia

Honoré Guilbeau
Evening
1932
lithograph
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Honoré Guilbeau
Night
1932
lithograph
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Raymond Jonson
Variations on Rhythm P
1932
oil on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art

Martin Lewis
Cronies
1932
aquatint
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Leo John Meissner
Stairway
1932
wood-engraving
Seattle Art Museum

Lloyd Sargent
South Akard Street
1932
oil on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art

Steuben Glass Works
Diana Vase
1932
blown and engraved glass
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

from Marginalia

Fate succumbs
many a species: one alone
jeopardises itself.

          *          *          *

Needing above all
silence and warmth, we produce
brutal cold and noise.

          *          *          * 

Wicked deeds have their glamour,
but those who commit them
are always bores.

          *           *         *

In semi-literate countries
demagogues pay
court to teen-agers.

          *           *          *

The Queen fled, leaving
books behind her
that shocked the pious usurper.

          *          *          *

Mulberries dropping,
twinges of lumbago,
as he read Clarendon.

– W.H. Auden (1965-68)

Thursday, July 16, 2026

Allies

Tomma Abts
Untitled (Big Circle)
2015
aquatint
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC


Herb Aach
No. 9
1973-74
gouache on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Francesco Botticini
Three Archangels (Michael, Raphael, Gabriel) with Tobias
1470
oil on panel
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

Giuseppe Bezzuoli
St Michael Archangel
1844
oil on canvas
private collection 

Tauba Auerbach
Organize I Poster
2017
laser print and rubber stamp on paper
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Tauba Auerbach
Persevere I Poster
2017
laser print and rubber stamp on paper
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Giuseppe Abbati
Cloister
before 1868
oil on canvas
Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Florence

Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Untitled
ca. 1960
C-print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Anni Albers
Preliminary Design for Wall Hanging
1926
gouache and graphite on paper
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Otl Aicher
Realistische Weltliteratur der Gegenwart
ca. 1949
photolithograph (poster)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Dennis Ashbaugh
Agit Prop Tram #2
1974
oil on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Anne Appleby
Coyote Meadow
1999
oil paint and wax on three canvases
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Trophime Bigot
Memento Mori
ca. 1630
oil on canvas
Palazzo Barberini, Rome

Luis Cruz Azaceta
Deadly Rain
1983
acrylic on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Alice Attie
Untitled
2001
digital print
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Anna Held Audette
Scrap Metal XVII
1997
oil on canvas
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

from Journal of an Airman

There are some birds in these valleys
Who flutter round the careless
With intimate appeal,
By seeming kindness trained to snaring,
They feel no falseness.

Under the spell completely 
They circle can serenely,
And in the tricky light
The masked hill has a purer greenness.
Their flight looks fleeter.

But fowlers, O, like foxes,
Lie ambushed in the rushes.
Along the harmless tracks
The madman keeper crawls through brushwood,
Axe under oxter.

Alas, the signal given,
Fingers on trigger tighten.
The real unlucky dove
Must smarting fall away from brightness,
Its love from living.

– W.H. Auden, The Orators (1931)