Windows

Pierre-Alexandre Wille
Young Woman at a Window
1813
drawing
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Lady Louisa Molyneux
A Cobbler
before 1855
watercolor on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Govert Flinck
Portrait of a Girl as a Shepherdess
1641
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Félix Bracquemond
The Eclipse
1869
etching
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Edward Steichen
Portrait of the Misses Sawyer
ca. 1914
autochrome
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Gerrit Dou
Woman at a Window
ca. 1655
oil on panel
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Pierre Bonnard
The Breakfast Room
1930-31
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Monogrammist G.M.E. (English draughtsman)
Farnham, Surrey
19th century
drawing
British Museum

Charles Ginner
Flask Walk: Rain
ca. 1924
watercolor and ink on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Edmund Charles Tarbell
Mother and Mary
1922
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Daniel Garber
South Room, Green Street
1920
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Alice Neel
Loneliness
1970
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

František Kupka
View from a Carriage Window
ca. 1901
watercolor and gouache on paper, with cardboard overlay
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Nicolas de Largillière
Decorative Composition
(intended for the residence of the artist)
ca. 1725-30
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Winifred Nicholson
The Hunter's Moon
1955
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

Michael Schreier
Trompe-l'oeil
2007
inkjet prints
Ottawa Art Gallery, Ontario

John Ruskin
Window - Palazzo Tolomei - Siena
1870
watercolor and gouache on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

I shall ride the parade in a platinum car,

My features shall shine, my name shall be Star,

Day-long and night-long the bells I shall peal,

And down the long street I shall turn the cartwheel.

So Little John, Long John, Peter and Paul,

And poor little Horace with only one ball,

You shall leave your breakfast, your desk and your play

On a fine summer morning the Devil to slay.

For it's order and trumpet and anger and drum

And power and glory command you to come;

The graves shall fly open and let you all in,

And the earth shall be emptied of mortal sin.

The fishes are silent deep in the sea,

The skies are lit up like a Christmas tree,

The star in the West shouts its warning cry:

'Mankind is alive, but Mankind must die.'

So good-bye to the house with its wallpaper red,

Good-bye to the sheets on the warm double bed,

Good-bye to the beautiful birds on the wall,

It's good-by, dear heart, good-bye to you all.

– W.H. Auden (1937)

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1939)

Ansel Adams
Pipes and Gauges, West Virginia
1939
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Yuri Albert
Untitled (Triangle)
1939
pigment on panel
Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina

George Copeland Ault
Barn
1939
gouache on board
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee

Rudy Burckhardt
New York
1939
gelatin silver print
Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine

Leroy Flint
Park Politicians
1939
engraving and aquatint (WPA project)
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Ian Grant
Self Portrait
1939
oil on canvas
Manchester Art Gallery

Lovering Hathaway
Rev. Israel Leonard House
1939
watercolor on paper
Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine

Jean Hélion
Composition Dramatique
1939
oil on canvas
(gift of Peggy Guggenheim)
Seattle Art Museum

Hans Hofmann
Yellow Vase on Red
1939
oil on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art

Vilmos Huszár
Dancers
1939
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Herschel C. Logan
Tornado
1939
woodcut
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Piet Mondrian
Abstraction
1939
oil on canvas
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Everett Spruce
Twins
1939
oil on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art

Seneca Textile Corporation (New York)
Fabric Panel - New York World's Fair
1939
screen-printed cotton
Art Institute of Chicago

Seneca Textile Corporation (New York)
Fabric Panel - New York World's Fair
1939
screen-printed cotton
Art Institute of Chicago

John Xceron
Untitled
1939
oil on canvas
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

from Thanksgiving for a Habitat

I. Prologue: The Birth of Architecture

                 (for John Bayley) 

From gallery-grave and the hunt of a wren-king

     to Low Mass and trailer-camp

is hardly a tick by the carbon-clock, but I

     don't count that way nor do you:

already it is millions of heart-beats ago

     back to the Bicycle Age,

before which is no After for me to measure,

     just a still prehistoric Once

where anything could happen. To you, to me,

     Stonehenge and Chartres Cathedral,

the Acropolis, Blenheim, the Albert Memorial

     are works by the same Old Man

under different names: we know what He did,

     what, even, He thought He thought,

but we don't see why. (To get that, one would have

     to be selfish in His way,

without concrete or grapefruit.) It's our turn now

     to puzzle the unborn. No world

wears as well as it should but, mortal or not,

     a world has still to be built

because of what we can see from our windows,

     that Immortal Commonwealth

which is there regardless: it's in perfect taste

     and it's never boring but

it won't quite do. Among its populations

     are masons and carpenters

who build the most exquisite shelters and safes,

     but no architects, any more

than there are heretics or bounders: to take

     umbrage at death, to construct

a second nature of tomb, and temple, lives

     must know the meaning of If.  

– W.H. Auden (1960)

Perceptions

Leopold Zinnögger
Hazelnuts
1851
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Franz Théobald Horny
Pumpkins, Pomegranates, Fig, Peach
before 1824
watercolor and gouache on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Georg Flegel
Tulips
ca. 1630
watercolor and gouache on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anton Tomschik
Studies of Apricots
1857
gouache on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

August Rokert
Ornithogalum umbellatum
ca. 1840
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Katharina, Baroness von Röthlein
Botanical Study
1819
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anonymous Dutch Artist
Assorted Shells
17th century
watercolor on paper
Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Bernd and Hilla Becher
Cooling Towers
1963-72
gelatin silver prints
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Jacques de Gheyn II
Flies
ca. 1600
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Christo
56 Barrels
1977
acrylic paint on paper
(design sketch for installation)
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Jan Beutener
Interior
1972
oil on canvas
Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands

Anonymous Printmaker
Pressmark of Bartholomäus Westheimer (Basel)
ca. 1540
woodcut
(serpent and arrow)
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Anonymous Printmaker
Pressmark of Aldus Manutius (Venice)
ca. 1500
woodcut and letterpress
(dolphin and anchor)
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Wenceslaus Hollar
Muffs
ca. 1645-46
etching
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Laura Gilpin
Nesting Tables made by Frank Gilpin
ca. 1930
platinum print
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Barnett Newman
Tertia
1964
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

In Ovid, Pygmalion is a sculptor who wants to fashion a woman after his own heart and falls in love with the statue he makes.  He prays to Venus for a bride modeled after that image, and the goddess turns the cold marble into a living body.  It is a myth that has naturally captivated the imagination of artists, the solemn and somewhat maudlin dreams of Burne-Jones no less than the irreverent mockery of Daumier.  Without the underlying promise of this myth, the secret hopes and fears that accompany the act of creation, there might be no art as we know it.  One of the most original young painters in England, Lucien [sic] Freud, wrote very recently: "A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art.  The promise of it is felt in the act of creation, but disappears towards the completion of the work.  For it is then that the painter realizes that it is only a picture he is painting.  Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life."

"Only a picture," says Lucien [sic] Freud.  It is a motif we find in the whole history of Western art: Vasari tells of Donatello at work on his Zuccone, looking at it suddenly and threatening the stone with a dreadful curse, "Speak, speak – favella, favella, che ti venga il cacasangue!"  And the greatest wizard of them all, Leonardo da Vinci, extolled the power of the artist to create.  In that hymn of praise to painting, the Paragone, he calls the painter "the Lord of all manner of people and of all things."  "If the painter wishes to see beauties to fall in love with, it is in his power to bring them forth, and if he wants to see monstrous things that frighten or are foolish or laughable or indeed to be pitied, he is their Lord and God."  

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960).

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1938)

Abe Blashko
A Stitch at Night (The Tailor)
1938
drawing
Seattle Art Museum

Paul Cadmus
Aspects of Suburban Life: Polo Spill
1938
etching
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Stuart Davis
Concert Pitch
1938
gouache on board
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Guy Pène Du Bois
Fog, Amagansett
1938
oil on canvas
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Julio González
Study for Mother and Child
1938
drawing
Institut Valencià d'Art Modern

Harry Gottlieb
The Strike is Won!
1938
screenprint
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Carl Robert Holty
Circus Forms
1938
oil on panel
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

George Hurrell
Bette Davis
1938
gelatin silver print
Portland Museum of Art, Maine

Fernand Léger
Head of a Woman
1938
drawing
Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia

Helen Levitt
New York
1938
gelatin silver print
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Henry Moore 
Stringed Figure
1938
bronze statuette
Dallas Museum of Art

Barbara Morgan
Martha Graham and Erick Hawkins
in American Document
1938
gelatin silver print
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Pablo O'Higgins
Man in Nazi Society
1938
lithograph
(poster for public lecture)
Seattle Art Museum

Georgia O'Keeffe
Red and Pink Rocks and Teeth
1938
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Pablo Picasso
Seated Woman with Hat
1938
oil on panel
Menil Collection, Houston

Ben Shahn
Farm People at the Fair, central Ohio
1938
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

from Shorts I

Between those happenings that prefigure it

And those that happen in its anamnesis

Occurs the Event, but that no human wit

Can recognize until all happening ceases.

                    *          *          *

       To Goethe: A Complaint

How wonderfully your songs begin

With praise of Nature and her beauty,

But then, as if it were a duty,

You drag some god-damned sweetheart in.

Did you imagine she'd be flattered?

They never sound as if they mattered.

                     *          *          *

A moon profaned by 

Sectarian din, death by

Fervent implosion:–

Possibles. But here and now

Our oath to the living word. 

– W.H. Auden (1959-69)