Pyre

Anonymous Spanish Makers
Reliquary Bust of St Ferdinand
ca. 1500 (head) and ca. 1850-1900 (bust)
partly-gilt silver and gems
Musée du Louvre

Yasuhiro Ishimoto
Untitled
ca. 1949-50
gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Domenico Ghirlandaio
Risen Chris appearing to the Virgin
ca. 1490
tempera and gold on panel
Musée du Louvre

Jasper Johns
Pyre
2003
encaustic on canvas, with wood
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Anonymous English Makers
Etui Nécessaire
ca. 1760-70
case with agate panels set in gold
and containing gold implements
Musée du Louvre

Yasuhiro Ishimoto
Child with Mask, Chicago
1960
gelatin silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Domenico Ghirlandaio
St Christopher
ca. 1472-75
detached fresco
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Jasper Johns
Pyre 2
2003
oil on canvas, with wood
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Anonymous German Makers
Lidded Mug with Snail and Seashells
17th century
ivory
Musée du Louvre

Yasuhiro Ishimoto
Untitled
ca. 1949-50
gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Domenico Ghirlandaio
St James the Greater flanked by St Stephen and St Peter
1493
tempera and oil on panel
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Jasper Johns
Land's End
1963
oi -on canvas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Anonymous French Maker
Biberon (infant feeding bottle)
16th century
blown glass
Musée du Louvre

Yasuhiro Ishimoto
Untitled
ca. 1949-50
gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Domenico Ghirlandaio
Three Heroes of Antiquity - Julius Caesar, Mucius Scaevola and Marcus Furius Camillus
ca. 1482-84
fresco
Sala dei Gigli, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

Jasper Johns
Zero through Nine
1970
lead relief
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Anonymous Japanese Maker
Vase in form of a Carp
before 1880
porcelain
Musée du Louvre

from In Time of War

Always far from the centre of our names,

The little workshop of love: yes, but how wrong

We were about the old manors and the long

Abandoned Folly and the children's games.

Only the acquisitive expects a quaint

Unsaleable product, something to please

An artistic girl; it's the selfish who sees

In every impractical beggar a saint.

We can't believe that we ourselves designed it,

A minor item of our daring plan

That caused no trouble; we took no notice of it.

Disaster comes, and we're amazed to find it

The single product that since work began

Through all the cycle showed a steady profit.

– W.H. Auden (1938)

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1917)

David Young Cameron
Old Museum, Beauvais
1917
etching and drypoint
Art Institute of Chicago

James Daugherty
The Ships Are Coming
1917
lithograph (poster)
Wichita Art Museu, Kansas

Charles Demuth
Acrobats in Red
1917
watercolor on paper
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

Theo van Doesburg
Composition IX, Opus 18
1917
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Gordon Grant
Eyes for the Navy
1917
lithograph (poster)
Wichita Art Museum,Kansas

Adrianus Johannes Grootens
Cubist Still Life
1917
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Ludwig Hohlwein
The Great War by Hanns von Zobeltitz
1917
lithograph (poster advertising book)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Vilmos Huszár
Composition with White Head
1917
encaustic on panel
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Alexei Jawlensky
Niobe
(series, Mystical Heads)
1917
encaustic on board
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Willem van Konijnenburg
Portrait of Peter Spaan
1917
oil on panel
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Bart van der Leck
Composition no. 8
1917
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Otto Carl Lendecke
The New Frock
1917
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Henri Matisse
Head of a Girl
1917
oil on panel
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

Martin Mower after Anonymous Photographer
Portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner
1917
oil on canvas
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Jules Pascin
Figures on Beach, Coney Island
1917
watercolor and ink on paper
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

Adolphe Valette
Self Portrait
1917
oil on canvas
Manchester Art Gallery

from Lullaby

Let your last thinks all be thanks:

praise your parents who gave you

a Super-Ego of strength

that saves you so much bother, 

digit friends and dear them all,

then pay fair attribution

to your age, to having been

born when you were. In boyhood

you were permitted to meet 

beautiful old contraptions,

soon to be banished from earth,

saddle-tank loks, beam-engines

and over-shot waterwheels. 

– W.H. Auden (1972)

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)