Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1929)

Otto Arpke
International Fur Trade Exposition, Leipzig
1929
offset print
(poster produced ahead of event)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Marianne Breslauer
Longchamp, Paris
1929
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Max Ernst
The Hundred-Headed Woman opens her August Sleeve
1929
printed paper collage
Menil Collection, Houston

Esther Gehlin
Still Life with Cod
1929
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Rockwell Kent
Night Watch
1929
wood-engraving
Seattle Art Museum

Fernand Léger
Composition with Vine
1929
oil on canvas
Seattle Art Museum

André Lhote
Three Women
1929
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

William Horace Littlefield
Boxers
1929
lithograph
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, New York

Kenneth Hayes Miller
New York Graces
1929
etching
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Pablo Picasso
Woman in Red Armchair
1929
oil on canvas
Menil Collection, Houston

Angelo Pinto
Three Lights Backstage
1929
wood-engraving
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Laurits Andersen Ring
Winter in Roskilde
1929
oil on canvas
Randers Kunstmuseum, Denmark

August Sander
Boxing champion Hein Domgörgen
portrayed by artist Heinrich Hoerle
1929
gelatin silver print
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Kurt Schwitters
Untitled
1929
collage on paper
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

William Sommer
Figure Studies
1929
watercolor on paper
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Maurice Tabard
Hand
1929
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

River Profile

Our body is a moulded river. 

                             – Novalis

Out of a bellicose fore-time, thundering

head-on collisions of cloud and rock in an

up-thrust, crevasse-and-avalanche, troll-country,

deadly to breathers,

it whelms into our picture below the melt-line,

where tarns lie frore under frowning cirques, goat-bell,

wind-breaker, fishing-rod, miner's-lamp country,

already at ease with

the mien and gestures that become its kindness,

in streams, still anonymous, still jumpable,

flows as it should through any declining country

in probing spirals.

Soon of a size to be named and the cause of

dirty in-fighting among rival agencies,

down a steep stair, penstock-and-turbine country,

it plunges ram-stam,

to foam through a wriggling gorge incised in softer

strata, hemmed between crags that nauntle heaven,

robber-baron, tow-rope, portage-way country,

nightmare of merchants. 

Disemboguing from foothills, now in hushed meanders,

now in riffling braids, it vaunts across a senile

plain, well-entered, chateau-and-cider-press country,

its regal progress 

gallanted for a while by quibbling poplars,

then by chimneys: led off to cool and launder

retort, steam-hammer, gasometer country,

it changes color. 

Polluted, bridged by girders, banked by concrete,

now it bisects a polyglot metropolis,

ticker-tape, taxi, brothel, foot-lights country,

à-la-mode always. 

Broadening or burrowing to the moon's phases,

turbid with pulverised wastemantle, on through

flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country

it scours, approaching

the tidal mark where it puts off majesty,

disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta,

punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country,

wearies to its final

act of surrender, effacement, atonement

in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled

attractive child ever dreams of, non-country,

image of death as

a spherical dew-drop of life. Unlovely

monsters, our tales believe, can be translated

too, even as water, the selfless mother

of all especials. 

– W.H. Auden (1966)

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1925)

George Copeland Ault
House in Brittany
1925
oil on canvas
Portland Museum of Art, Maine

Edward Bawden
Natural History Museum, South Kensington
1925
lithograph (poster)
Art Institute of Chicago

Claude Cahun
Untitled
1925
gelatin silver print
Institut Valencià d'Art Modern

Theo van Doesburg
Counter-Composition XVI
1925
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Durr Freedley
Portrait of Mr & Mrs H.H. Freedley
1925
tempera on board
Indianapolis Museum of Art

Paul Morgan Gustin
Guardians of the Pont du Carrousel
1925
etching
Frye Art Museum, Seattle

Frederic Charles Herrick
Arrest the Flying Moment
1925
lithograph
(poster for London Underground)
Art Institute of Chicago

Wassily Kandinsky
Three Elements
1925
oil on board
Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg

Paul Manship
Diana
1925
bronze
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Daniel de Monfreid
Hommage à Gauguin
1925
oil on canvas
Musée Hyacinthe Rigaud, Perpignan

Gerald Murphy
Watch
1925
oil on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art

Axel Nilsson
Still Life with Pots
1925
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Pablo Picasso
Three Dancers
1925
drawing
Menil Collection, Houston

Alexander Rodchenko
The Workers' Club - International Exhibition
of Decorative Arts and Modern Industry, Paris
1925
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Weston
Neil
1925
palladium print
Art Institute of Chicago

Richard Wyndham
Le Vieux Quartier, Marseille
1925
graphite and watercolor on paper
Manchester Art Gallery

from The Aliens

Wide though the interrupt be that divides us, runers and counters,

from the Old World of the Plants, all lapped in a tolerant silence,

where, by the grace of chlorophyll, few of them ever have taken

life and not one put a sceptical question, we nod them as neighbours

who, to conclude from their friendly response to a gardener's handling,

like to be given the chance to get more than self-education.

As for the hot-blooded Beasts, we didn't need Darwin to tell us

horses and rabbits and mice are our cognates, the double-voiced song-birds

cousins, however removed: unique as we seem, we, too, are

shovelled out into the cold, poodle-naked, as male or as female,

grab at and gobble up proteins, drop dung, perform the ungainly

brute-with-two-backs until, dared and doddered by age, we surrender,

lapse into stagnant stuff, while they by retaining a constant

visible shape through a lifetime, accord with our human idea of

having a Self. 

– W.H. Auden (1970)

Angular

Olga Rozanova
Non-Objective Composition (Suprematism)
1916-17
oil on canvas
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Kurt Schwitters
Composition
1936
collage on paper
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Georges Valmier
Still Life with Geometric Forms I
1919
oil on canvas
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Lyubov Popova
Untitled
1917
color linocut
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques
des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Wiener Porzellanmanufaktur
Design for Decorative Border
ca. 1800
gouache on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Piet Mondrian
Rhythm in Straight Lines
1937-42
oil on canvas
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

Ivan Klyun
Suprematist Composition
1922
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Marsden Hartley
Provincetown Abstraction
1916
oil on board
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Wassily Kandinsky
Composition
1924
gouache on paper
Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg

Juan Gris
Still Life with White Cloud
1921
oil on canvas
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Kasimir Malevich
Supremas No. 38
1916
oil on canvas
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Chris Beekman
Young Women with Umbrella
1917-18
oil on canvas
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Roy Lichtenstein
Modern Painting with Classic Head
ca. 1967
screenprint
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Oskar Kokoschka
Geneviève de Brabant
1908
watercolor on paper
(postcard design for Wiener Werkstätte)
Kunsthalle Mannheim

Pierre-Albert Bégaud
Académie
ca. 1925
drawing
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux

Egon Schiele
Self Portrait Crouching
1913
drawing, with added gouache
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

The same winter also the Athenians hallowed the isle of Delos, by the admonition indeed of a certain oracle.  For Pisistratus also, the tyrant, hallowed the same before; not all, but only so much as was within the prospect of the temple.  But now they hallowed it all over in this manner.  They took away all sepulchres whatsoever of such as had died there before, and for the future made an edict that none should be suffered to die nor any woman to bring forth child in the island; but when they were near their time, either of the one or the other, they should be carried over into Rheneia.  This Rheneia is so little a way distant from Delos that Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, who was once of great power by sea and had the dominion of the other islands, when he won Rheneia dedicated the same to Apollo of Delos, tying it unto Delos with a chain.  And now after the hallowing of it, the Athenians instituted the keeping, every fifth year, of the Delian games.  There had also in old time been great concourse in Delos, both of Ionians and of the islanders around about.  For they then came to see the games, with their wives and children, as the Ionians do now the games of Ephesus.  There were likewise matches set of bodily exercise and of music; and the cities did severally set forth dances.  Which things to have been so, is principally declared by Homer . . . 

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

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1919)

Max Slevogt
Still Life with Rhubarb
1919
oil on canvas
Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Portrait of Emy
1919
oil on canvas
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Emil Orlik
Kokoschka as Theatrical Director
1919
lithograph
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Amedeo Modigliani
Cypresses and Houses at Cagnes
1919
oil on canvas
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

Joan Miró
Aviat L'Instant
1919
oil on board
(design for magazine cover)
Institut Valencià d'Art Modern

Kenneth Hayes Miller
Half-Length Study of Model
1919
etching
Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia

Henri Matisse
La Femme au Paravent
1919
oil on canvas
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

John Marin
Seal Rocks, Maine
1919
watercolor on paper
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Fernand Léger
The Typographer
1919
oil on canvas
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Ludwig Hohlwein
International Imports Fair, Frankfurt
1919
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Erich Heckel
Portrait of a Man
1919
color woodblock print
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

George Grosz
Workers in Revolt
1919
drawing, with added gouache
Dallas Museum of Art

Arvid Fougstedt
Picador
1919
oil on canvas
Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Sweden

Charles Dufresne
Les Ondines de la Marne
1919
oil on canvas
Musée d'Art Moderne de Troyes

Lovis Corinth
Expulsion from Paradise
1919
woodcut
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

 

Charles Demuth
Masts
1919
tempera on board
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

A Shock

Housman was perfectly right,

Our world rapidly worsens:

nothing now is so horrid

or silly it can't occur.

Still, I'm stumped by what happened

to upper-middle-class me,

born in '07 when Strauss 

was starting on Elektra,

gun-shy myopic grandchild

of Anglican clergymen,

suspicious of all passion,

including passionate love,

day-dreaming of leafy dells

that shelter carefree shepherds,

averse to violent weather,

pained by the predator beasts,

shocked by boxing and blood-sports,

when I, I, I, if you please,

at Schwechat Flughafen was

frisked by a cop for weapons.

– W.H. Auden (1971)