Cousins

Joseph Cornell
Home, Poor Heart
ca. 1962
printed paper collage under blue glass
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Sam Francis
Blue Balls
1962
gouache on paper
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Richard Aldrich
Art and Language II
2014
enamel and charcoal on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Yves Klein
Anthropometrie: Princess Helena
1960
oil on paper, mounted on panel
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Georgia O'Keeffe
Pelvis I
1944
oil on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
Homage to Johnny
2002
screenprint
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Peter Agostini
Untitled
1956
watercolor on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Raoul Dufy
The Landing
1928
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Susan Rothenberg
Untitled no. 84
1979
acrylic and charcoal on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Joel Shapiro
Untitled
1979
painted wood
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Serge Poliakoff
Untitled
1969
gouache on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Roman Empire
Cup
1st century AD
blown glass
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Cy Twombly
The Ceiling
2010
ceiling painting for the Salle des Bronzes
Musée du Louvre

Sharon Ellis
Winter Bouquet
2009
alkyd on canvas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Llyn Foulkes
Les Beaux
1989
mixed media on canvas
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Marguerita Mergentime for Linens by Dewan
Food-for-Thought Tablecloth
ca. 1936
printed linen
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Clarence H. White
Alfred Stieglitz
ca. 1907-1910
cyanotype
Princeton University Art Museum

from Argument

    Remember not what we thought during the frost, what we said in the small hours, what we did in the desert.  Spare us, lest of our own volition we draw down the avalanche of your anger: lest we suffer the tragic fate of the insects,

            O Four Just Men, spare us.

    From the immense bat-shadow of home; from the removal of landmarks: from appeals for love and from the comfortable words of the devil,

            O Dixon Hawke, deliver us. 

    From all opinions and personal ties; from pity and shame; and from the wish to instruct,

            O Sexton Blake, deliver us.

    From all nervous excitement and follies of the will; from the postponed guilt and the deferred pain; from the oppression of noon and from the terror in the night,

            O Bulldog Drummond, deliver us.

– W.H. Auden, The Orators (1931)

Cousins

Anne Appleby
Untitled
1992
oil paint and wax on canvas
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Rudolf de Crignis
#01.37
2001
oil on canvas
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Alfonso Fratteggiani Bianchi
Senza Titolo, Blu
2004
pigment on stone
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Gottfried Honegger
Z-611
1970
acrylic paint on cast fiberglass
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Heiner Thiel
Untitled
1998
anodized aluminum
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Ludwig Sander
Composition - Blue
1960
oil paint and crayon on canvas
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Wolfgang Tillmans
Konzentrische Kreise
1999
C-print
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Arthur Wesley Dow
Pelham, New York
ca. 1890
cyanotype
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Mark Tansey
Lens
1999
oil on canvas
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Robert Motherwell
The August Sea #6
1972
acrylic on canvas
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

William Scott
Blue Painting
1960
oil on canvas
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Brice Marden
6 (Course)
1987-88
oil on linen
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

David Schnell
Schleier
2012
oil on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Willem de Kooning
A Tree in Naples
1960
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Sean Scully
Landline Blue Sea
2016
oil on aluminum
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

Saliba Douaihy
Sea Wind
1966
oil on canvas
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Alice Makara
SS #4
1978
acrylic on canvas
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

from Argument

    Wrap gifts in clothes, prepare a present for a simpler nation.  A heliograph seen from below, a camera with smuggled lenses: a soured drink for the tongue, a douche for the unpopular member, a dream dirt-cheap for the man of action.  Leave the corks behind as warning of wires, let the shafts be fenced as before, leave ordinary kindness. 

    Going abroad tonight?  The face lit up by the booking-clerk's window.  Poetry of the waiting room.  Is it wise, the short adventure on the narrow ship?  The boat-train dives accomplished for the hoop of the tunnel; over the derne cutting lingering, its white excreta.  Too late: smelling the first sea-weed we may not linger.  The waving handkerchiefs recede and the gulls wheel after screaming for scraps.  Throb of turbines below water, passing the mud islands, the recurrent light.  Past.  Handrail, funnel, oilskins, them, His will.  The lasting sky. 

– W.H. Auden, The Orators (1931)

Cerulean

Jasper Johns
Tango
1955
encaustic on canvas
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Léonard Limosin
Portrait of Guy Chabot, Baron de Jarnac
ca. 1540-45
enamel on copper
Frick Collection, New York

Anonymous French Artist
Portrait of a Youth in Antique Dress
17th century
oil on canvas
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Narbonne

Romain Cazes
Ariadne Abandoned
1847
oil on canvas
Musée Ingres Bourdelle, Montauban

Stuart Davis
Self Portrait
1919
oil on canvas
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Giuseppe Devers after Ary Scheffer
The Muse Euterpe
ca. 1860
porcelain plaque
Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands

Richard Diebenkorn
Untitled
1970
lithograph
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Mark Gertler
Portrait of a Young Woman
(possibly Dora Carrington)
1912
tempera and oil on canvas
Huntington Library and Art Museum,
San Marino, California

Bertha E. Jaques
Seed Form of Jimson Weed
1909
cyanotype
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Stephen Kaltenbach
The Starlight Bowl
1968-69
ink and crayon on paper
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Christian Friedrich Reinhold Lisiewski
Portrait of Leopold III, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau
1758
pastel on paper
Schloss Mosigkau, Dessau

Jan van Eyck
Portrait of a Man
ca. 1428-29
oil on panel
Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu, Romania

Eugène Jansson
Dawn over Riddarfjärden
1899
oil on canvas
Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm

Ferdinand Hodler-
Transfiguration
ca. 1904
oil on canvas
Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal

Karl Mediz
Cypresses
1898
oil on canvas
Kunstsammlungen, Chemnitz

Robert Glenn Ketchum
Bald Eagle
1985
C-print
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

On a Portrait of Galen – There was a time, Galen, when, owing to thee, Earth received men mortal and reared them in immortality.  The halls of tearful Acheron were bereaved by the force of thy healing hand.

On a Picture of the Physician Iamblichus – This is Iamblichus, sweetest among men, who reached old age without knowing the converse of Aphrodite; but practising medicine and teaching his skill to others, he did not hold out his hand to receive even righteous gain.

On a Picture of the Physician Praxagoras – The son of Phoebus himself, anointing his hand with juice of the all-healing herb, rubbed into thy breast, Praxagoras, the pain-stilling science of medicine.  Therefore thou knowest from gentle Hepione herself all woes that spring from long fevers, and what drugs it is fitting to lay on flesh cut by the knife.  Had mortals had sufficient of such healers, the boat heavy with the dead would never have crossed the ferry.   

On Oribasius the Physician – This is the great physician of the Emperor Julian, divine Oribasius, right worthy of this pious gift; for he had a wise mind like a bee, gathering from this place and that the flowers of former physicians.

On a Statue of Time by Lysippus – A. "Who and whence was the sculptor?"  B. "From Sicyon."  A. "And his name?"  B. "Lysippus."  A. "And who art thou?"  B. "Time who subdueth all things."  A. "Why dost thou stand on tip-toe?"  B. "I am ever running."  A. "And why hast thou a pair of wings on thy feet?"  B. "I fly with the wind."  A. "And why dost thou hold a razor in thy right hand?"  B. "As a sign to men that I am sharper than any sharp edge."  A. "And why does thy hair hang over thy face?"  B. "For him who meets me to take me by the forelock."  A. "And why, in Heaven's name, is the back of thy head bald?"  B. "Because none whom I have once raced by on my winged feet will now, though he wishes it sore, take hold of me from behind."  A. "And why did the artist fashion thee?"  B. "For your sake, stranger, and he set me up in the porch as a lesson."

On a Statue of Arion – Periander set up here this statue of Arion and the dolphin of the sea that swum together with him when he was perishing.  The story says of Arion, "We are killed by men and saved by fish."

– from Book XVI (Epigrams of the Planudean Anthology) in the Greek Anthology, translated and edited by W.R. Paton (1918)