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)

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1902-1903)

Michael Peter Ancher
Christmas Day, 1900
painted 1902
oil on canvas
Skagens Museum, Denmark

Andreas Martin Andersen
Torso of Dionysus at Fenway Court
1902
oil on canvas
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Frederick H. Evans
York Minster: In Sure and Certain Hope
1902
photogravure
Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia

Eugène Atget
Bassin de Neptune, Versailles
1902
albumen print
Art Institute of Chicago

Eugène Atget
Bosquet de l'Arc de Triomphe, Versailles
1903
albumen print
Art Institute of Chicago

Thomas Eakins
Portrait of Mrs Mary Hallock Greenewalt
1903
oil on canvas
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Robert Henri
Barnacles on Rocks
1903
oil on panel
Portland Museum of Art, Maine

Max Kurzweil
The Cushion
1903
color woodblock print
(trial proof)
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Max Kurzweil
The Cushion
1903
color woodblock print
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Alexandre Lunois
Le Magazin de Nouveautés
1903
lithograph
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Henri Matisse
Studio under the Eaves
1903
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Koloman Moser
Frommes Kalender, Vienna
1903
lithograph (poster)
Leopold Museum, Vienna

Pablo Picasso
Young Woman holding a Cigarette
1903
oil on canvas
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

John Sloan
The Burglars
1903
etching (magazine illustration)
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida
On the Beach of the Santa Clara Sanitorium
1903
oil on canvas
Museo de Bellas Artes Gravina en Alicante

Friedrich Viktor Spitzer
Woman from Kattwyk
1903
photogravure
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

from The Rock

                                  II

                     The Poem as Icon

It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.

We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground

Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure

Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.

And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,

If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,

And if we are the incipient colorings

Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.

The fiction of the leaves is the icon

Of the poem, the figuration of blessedness,

And the icon is the man. The pearled chaplet of spring,

The magnum wreath of summer, time's autumn snood,

Its copy of the sun, these cover the rock.

These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.

These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves,

In the predicate that there is nothing else.

They bud and bloom and bear their fruit without change.

They are more than leaves that cover the barren rock,

They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout,

New senses in the engenderings of sense,

The desire to be at the end of distances,

The body quickened and the mind in root.

They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love.

They bear their fruit so that the year is known,

As if its understanding was brown skin,

The honey in its pulp, the final found,

The plenty of the year and of the world.

In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock,

Of such mixed motion and such imagery

That its barrenness becomes a thousand things

And so exists no more. This the cure

Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves.

His words are both the icon and the man.

– Wallace Stevens (1954)

Aquatic - II

Thomas Eakins
Study for Swimming with Art Students as Models
1884
albumen print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Thomas Eakins
Swimming
1885
oil on canvas
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Helmuth Macke
Three Bathers
1914
oil on cardboard
Museum Penzberg, Germany

Mette Tronvoll
Untitled
1999
C-print
KORO (Public Art Norway), Oslo

Johann Nepomuk Schödlberger
Landscape with Bathing Nymphs
ca. 1810-20
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Abraham Rutgers
Landscape with Two Fishermen beside a Road
ca. 1682
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Rudolf Hirth du Frênes
On the Beach
ca. 1880
oil on paper
Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe

Eugène Boudin
Beach Scene
1893
oil on panel
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Louis-Alexandre Dubourg
Strollers on the Jetty at Honfleur
ca. 1880
oil on canvas
Musée d'Art Moderne André Malraux, Le Havre

Tristram Hillier
Quantoxhead
1946
oil on panel
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Claude Monet
Rough Water, Étretat
1883
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Max Kurzweil
Seascape in Moonlight
ca. 1900
oil on canvas
Belvedere Museum, Vienna

Anton Kolig
Narcissus
1920
oil on canvas
Belvedere Museum, Vienna

Ludwig von Hofmann
Beach at Nieustede
1910
pastel on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Anonymous German Artist
Mermaid
16th century
woodcut
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Clara E. Sipprell
Women in Rowboats
1905
cyanotype
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

As for cities, such as are of late foundation and since the increase of navigation, inasmuch as thy have had since more plenty of riches, have been walled about and built upon the shore, and have taken up isthmi both for merchandise and for the better strength against confiners.  But the old cities, men having been in those times for the most part infested by thieves, are built father up, as well in the islands as in the continent.  For others also that dwelt on the seaside, though not seamen, yet they molested one another with robberies.  And even to these times those people are planted up high in the country.

But these robberies were the exercise especially of the islanders, the Carians and the Phoenicians.  For by them were the greatest part of the islands inhabited, a testimony whereof is this.  The Athenians when in this present war they hallowed the isle of Delos and had digged up the sepulchres of the dead found that more than half of them were Carians, known so to be both by the armour buried with them and also by their manner of burial at this day.  And when Minos his navy was once afloat, navigators had the sea more free.  For he expelled the malefactors out of the islands and in the most of them planted colonies of his own.  By which means they who inhabited the sea-coasts, becoming more addicted to riches, grew more constant to their dwellings, of whom some, grown now rich, compassed their towns about with walls.  For out of desire of gain, the meaner sort underwent servitude with the mighty; and the mighty with their wealth brought the lesser cities into subjection.  And so it came to pass that rising to power, they proceeded afterward to the war against Troy. 

– from The Peloponnesian War as written by Thucydides (5th century BC) and translated by Thomas Hobbes (1628) and edited by David Grene (1959)

Aquatic - I

Carl Kuntz
Falls of the Rhine near Schaffhausen
1793
watercolor and gouache on paper
Kunsthalle Mannheim

Anonymous Swiss Artist
Fireworks over the Rhine Falls at Schaffhausen
ca. 1890
postcard
Graphische Sammlung, Zentralbibliothek Zürich

Anonymous Swiss Artist
Fireworks over the Rhine Falls at Schaffhausen
ca. 1910
postcard
Graphische Sammlung, Zentralbibliothek Zürich

John Mix Stanley
Palouse Falls
1860
lithograph
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Gustave Courbet
Falls of the Doubs
ca. 1855-60
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nice

Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich
Waterfalls at Tivoli
1744
etching
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Lovis Corinth
Walchensee with the Slope of the Jochberg
1924
oil on canvas
Landesmuseum Hannover

Charles Cushman
Ocean Beach from Sutro Heights, San Francisco
1952
Kodachrome slide
Indiana University Library, Bloomington

Félix Vallotton
Evening View of Trouville
1910
oil on canvas
Clemens-Sels Museum, Neuss, Germany

Frits Thaulow
Behind the Mills, Montreuil-sur-Mer
1892
oil on canvas
Lillehammer Kunstmuseum, Norway

Per Christian Brown
Tiergarten
2014
C-print
KORO (Public Art Norway), Oslo

Marinus Pieter Reus
Bridge over a Ditch
ca. 1890
oil on canvas
Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands

Kalle Berggren
Bathing Platform
1976
gouache on paper
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Karl Theodor Reiffenstein
Wooden Sluice
1860
watercolor on paper
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Christian Rohlfs
The Sternbrücke, Weimar
1887
oil on canvas
Osthaus Museum, Hagen, Germany

Johan Rohde
Evening by the Karup
1889
oil on canvas
Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen

For the Grecians in old time, and such barbarians as in the continent lived near unto the sea or else inhabited the islands after once they began to cross over one to another in ships, became thieves and went abroad under the conduct of their most puissant men, both to enrich themselves and to fetch in maintenance for the weak, and falling upon towns unfortified and scatteringly inhabited, rifled them and made this the best means of their living, being a matter at that time nowhere in disgrace but rather carrying with it something of glory.  This is manifest by some that dwell on the continent, amongst whom, so it be performed nobly, it is still esteemed as an ornament.  The same also is proved by some of the ancient poets, who introduce men questioning of such as sail by, on all coasts alike, whether they be thieves or not, as a thing neither scorned by such as were asked nor upbraided by those that were desirous to know.  They also robbed one another within the mainland.  And much of Greece useth that old custom, as the Locrians called Ozolae, the Acarnanians, and those of the continent in that quarter, unto this day.  Moreover, the fashion of wearing iron remaineth yet with the people of that continent from their old trade of thieving. 

For once they were wont throughout all Greece to go armed because their houses were unfenced and travelling was unsafe, and accustomed themselves, like the barbarians, to the ordinary wearing of their armour.  And the nations of Greece that live so yet, do testify that the same manner of life was anciently universal to all the rest.  Amongst whom the Athenians were the first that laid by their armour and growing civil, passed into a more tender kind of life.  And such of the rich as were anything stepped into years laid away upon the same delicacy, not long after, the fashion of wearing linen coats and golden grasshoppers, which they were wont to bind up in the locks of their hair.  

– from The Peloponnesian War as written by Thucydides (5th century BC) and translated by Thomas Hobbes (1628) and edited by David Grene (1959)