Showing posts with label bathers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bathers. Show all posts

Saturday, July 18, 2026

Envy and Detraction

Roman Empire
Bowl
1st century AD
cast glass
Getty Museum, Los Angeles


Joseph Cornell
Allegory of Innocence
1956
printed paper collage
Museum of Modern Art, New York

David Park
Two Bathers
1958
oil on canvas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

John Hamilton Mortimer
Figures of Envy and Detraction
1779
drawing (print study)
British Museum

Roman Empire
Bowl
1st century AD
cast glass
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Joseph Cornell
Constellation (Project for a Christmas card)
1953
printed paper collage with added gouache
Museum of Modern Art, New York

David Park
Sunbather
ca. 1950-53
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

John Hamilton Mortimer
Banditti around a Tomb
ca. 1778
drawing
British Museum

Roman Empire
Bowl
1st century AD
cast glass
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Joseph Cornell
Bear with Angel (Christmas greeting)
1953
printed paper collage, relief print and ink
Museum of Modern Art, New York

David Park
Torso
1959
oil on canvas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

John Hamilton Mortimer
Head Studies
ca. 1760-70
drawing
British Museum

Roman Empire
Bowl
1st century BC - 1st century AD
agate glass slumped over mold
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Joseph Cornell
Portrait of the Artist's Daughter by Vigée-Lebrun
ca. 1960
printed paper collage
Museum of Modern Art, New York

David Park
The Bathers
1959
oil on canvas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

John Hamilton Mortimer
Monsters
ca. 1778-79
ink and watercolor on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Roman Empire
Inkwell
1st-2nd century AD
blown glass
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

from Six Odes

Not, Father, further do prolong
        Our necessary defeat;
Spare us the numbing zero-hour,
        The desert-long retreat.

Against your direct light, displayed,
        Regardant, absolute,
In person stubborn and oblique
        Our maddened set we foot.

These nissen huts if hiding could
        Your eye inseeing from
Firm fenders were, but look! to us
        Your loosened angers come.

Against your accusations
        Though ready wit devise,
Nor magic countersigns prevail
        Nor airy sacrifice.

Weaker we are, and strict within
        Your organized blockade,
And from our desperate shore the last
        Few pallid youngsters fled.  

Be not another than our hope;
        Expect we routed shall
Upon your peace; with ray disarm,
        Illumine, and not kill.

– W.H. Auden, The Orators (1931)

Saturday, June 27, 2026

Aestival

Simon Vouet
Summer
(series, The Four Seasons)
ca. 1644-45
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin


Roger de La Fresnaye
The Bathers
1912
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Joan Miró
Bather
1932
oil on panel
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Théodore Roussel
Summer
1900
etching
British Museum

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
Summer
1891
oil on canvas
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Camille Pissarro
Bather
1895
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Grace Hartigan
River Bathers
1953
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Jasper Johns
Summer
1985
encaustic on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Robert Motherwell
Summer Collage
1984-85
acrylic and collage on board
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Anonymous American Photographer
Beach Couple
1929
gelatin silver print
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, New York

Winslow Homer
East Hampton Beach, Long Island
1874
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Otto Müller
Bathers in the Dunes
ca. 1922
oil on burlap
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Henri Matisse
Bather
1909
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

David Park
Bathers
1954
oil on canvas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Max Pechstein
Summer Day
1911
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Stephen Frykholm
Herman Miller Summer Picnic
1979
screenprint (poster)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Hans von Aachen
Personification of Summer
before 1615
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

There is no 'mystery' in Racine – that is to say, there are no metaphysical speculations in him, no suggestions of the transcendental, no hints as to the ultimate nature of reality and the constitution of the world; and so away with him, a creature of mere rhetoric and ingenuities, to the outer limbo!  But if, instead of asking what a writer is without, we try to discover simply what he is, will not our results be more worthy of our trouble?  And in fact, if we once put out of our heads our longing for the mystery of metaphysical suggestion, the more we examine Racine, the more clearly we shall discern in him another kind of mystery, whose presence may eventually console us for the loss of the first – the mystery of the mind of man.  This indeed is the framework of his poetry, and to speak of it adequately would demand a wider scope than that of an essay; for how much might be written of that strange and moving background, dark with the profundity of passion and glowing with the beauty of the sublime, wherefrom the great personages of his tragedies – Hermione and Mithridate, Roxane and Agrippine, Athalie and Phèdre – seem to emerge for a moment towards us, whereon they breathe and suffer, and among whose depths they vanish for ever from our sight!

– Lytton Strachey on Racine (1908)

Saturday, June 6, 2026

Dispositions

Allan Sekula
Dockers loading Sugar Ship, Calais
1996
C-prints (triptych)
Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California


Charles Haslewood Shannon
The Bathers
ca. 1905
lithograph
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Everett Shinn
Bathers
1910
oil on canvas
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

W. Eugene Smith
Country Doctor
1948
gelatin silver print
Princeton University Art Museum

attributed to Gilbert Soest
Portrait of a Royalist Officer
ca. 1646-49
oil on canvas
Courtauld Gallery, London

Andrea Solario
Christ carrying the Cross
ca. 1510
oil on panel
Galleria Borghese, Rome

Pierre Soulages
Painting - March, 1958
1958
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Carl Spitzweg
Philosopher in the Park
ca. 1851
oil on canvas
Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal

attributed to Hendrick van Steenwyck the Younger
Charles I as Prince of Wales
ca. 1619-21
oil on canvas
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Joel Sternfeld
Learning by Jean Charlot
Camp Rockmont, Black Mountain, North Carolina

(outdoor mural, disregarded and disappearing)
2005
C-print
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Marie Spartali Stillman
Kelmscott Manor from the Field
ca. 1890
watercolor and gouache on paper
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

Lou Stoumen
Nude (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania)
ca. 1935
gelatin silver print
New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut

Benjamin Strauss
Dolores del Rio
ca. 1927
gelatin silver print
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Antonio Saura
Sija (Gina Lollobrigida)
1959
oil on canvas
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Theo Scharf
The Music Lovers
ca. 1923
etching
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Johann Heinrich Schönfeld
Calvary
ca. 1647-48
oil on canvas
Princeton University Art Museum

Sebastiano del Piombo
Figure of Martha
(study for painting, The Raising of Lazarus)
ca. 1517-19
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

"Brian's trouble – as with so many aesthetes of his generation – was a basic ignorance, due to having failed to learn anything or to have learned how to learn when at school and university.  This vagueness had the effect of casting suspicion on the things he actually had learnt – except for matters of clothes, deportment and behaviour, in which for a few years he reigned supreme.  He should have been a Prince Genji composing epigrams and perfumes, despatching footmen with love letters, judging flower arrangements.  But he was too poor and too intelligent.  He was also extremely ambitious and determined to be famous, and to dominate the company he found himself in.  This he could only do through mockery of those who were stupider or commoner than himself."

– Cyril Connolly, issuing an unfriendly assessment of Brian Howard based on a Mediterranean tour they took together in 1933 – Connolly paid the bills while being derided by his companion