Drowse

Ippolito Marracci
Allegory of Sleep with Cupid, Diana, Endymion and Hebe
ca. 1690-1710
ceiling fresco
Palazzo Mansi, Lucca

Tim Gardner
Untitled (Ryan in Bed)
2002
watercolor on paper
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

James Tissot
Woman Sleeping
ca. 1871-73
watercolor and gouache on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Louis-Claude Vassé
Sleeping Shepherd
1751
marble
Musée du Louvre

Lee Friedlander
Helen Levitt, New York City
1959
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Auden, Emma and Dogs
1989
C-print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri)
Virgin and sleeping Child with young St John the Baptist
ca. 1605
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Henri Decaisne
Guardian Angel
(after poem by Lamartine)
ca. 1825
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

François Le Moyne
Daphnis with sleeping Chloe
ca. 1721
oil on canvas
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

François-Nicolas Delaistre
Cupid and Psyche
ca. 1790
marble
Musée du Louvre

Juan Antonio Escalante
Angel with prophet Isaiah in the Wilderness
ca. 1660
oil on canvas
Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anonymous French Photographer
Clinique vétérinaire Malvezin, Paris
ca. 1905
gelatin silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Paris Bordone
Sleeping Warrior
before 1571
drawing
British Museum

Marlene Dumas
Jen
2005
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

attributed to Ubaldo Gandolfi
Sleeping Child
ca. 1760
oil on canvas
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Anne-Louis Girodet
Sleeping Bacchus
ca. 1790-91
oil on panel
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Conrad Marca-Relli
Sleeping Figure
1953-54
collage of painted canvas elements on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

from In Time of War

Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice,

Again and again we sigh for an ancient South,

For the warm nude ages of instinctive poise,

For the taste of joy in the innocent mouth.

Asleep in our huts, how we dream of a part

In the glorious balls of the future; each intricate maze

Has a plan, and the disciplined movements of the heart

Can follow for ever and ever its harmless ways.

We envy streams and houses that are sure:

But we are articled to error; we

Were never nude and calm like a great door,

And never will be perfect like the fountains;

We live in freedom of necessity,

A mountain people dwelling among mountains.

– W.H. Auden (1938)

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1946)

Jack Grue
Still Life no. 16
1946
watercolor on ivory
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee

Charles Howard
The First Hypothesis
1946
oil on canvas
Menil Collection, Houston

Paul Landacre
Children's Carnival
1946
wood-engraving
Tacoma Art Museum

Dorothea Tanning
Guardian Angels
1946
oil on canvas
New Orleans Museum of Art

Fernand Léger
The White Butterfly
1946
oil on canvas
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Francis Bacon
Figure Study I
1946
oil on canvas
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Max Beckmann
Dressing Room
1946
oil on canvas
Kunsthaus Zürich

David Bomberg
Sunset, The Bay, North Devon
1946
oil on canvas
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

Arvid Fougstedt
Mother and Child
1946
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Dod Procter
Autumn Flowers
1946
oil on canvas
Royal Academy of Arts, London

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

Clare Leighton
Clam Diggers
1946
wood-engraving
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Bernard Brussel-Smith
The Bunk
1946
wood-engraving
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

Eugene Berman
Stage Design for ballet Armida
1946
watercolor and gouache on paper
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Rein Draijer
The Yellow Chair
1946
oil on canvas
Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Walker Evans
Victorian Building, South Side, Chicago
1946
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

from Dichtung und Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem)

                                                             VII

The "symboliste" attempt to make poetry as intransitive as music, can get no further than the narcissistic reflexive – "I love Myself"; the attempt to make poetry as objective as painting can get no further than the single comparison "A is like B", "C is like D", "E is like F" . . . No "imagist" poem can be more than a few words long. 

                                                             VIII

As an artistic language, Speech has many advantages – three persons, three tenses (Music and Painting have only the Present Tense), both the active and the passive voice – but it has one serious defect: it lacks the Indicative Mood. All its statements are in the subjunctive and only possibly true until verified (which is not always possible) by non-verbal evidence. 

                                                               IX

First I write I was born in York; then, I was born in New York: to discover which statement is true and which false, it is no use studying my handwriting.

                                                                X

I can imagine a forger clever enough to imitate another's signature so exactly that a handwriting expert would swear in court that it was genuine, but I cannot imagine a forger so clever that he could imitate his own signature inexactly enough to make a handwriting expert swear that it was a forgery. (Or is it only that I cannot imagine the circumstances in which anyone could want to do such a thing?)

– W.H. Auden (1959)

Derivations

Jost Amman
Medea with Dragons
1578
woodcut
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Anonymous German Artist
Mermaid bearing Coat of Arms
ca. 1560
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Anonymous German Artist
Mythical Sea Creatures Battling
17th century
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Anonymous Artist after Parmigianino
Jason with the Golden Fleece
ca. 1590
woodcut
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anonymous Ferrarese Artist
Theseus abandoning Ariadne
ca. 1540
oil on panel
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

Nicolaes Berchem
Death of Dido
1678
oil on canvas
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Anonymous European Artist
Bacchanal
17th century
oil on canvas
Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands

Anonymous French Artist
Iphigénie en Tauride
17th century
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest

Charles Brocas
Aristides
(as described by Herodotus)
1806
oil on canvas
Musée des Augustins de Toulouse

attributed to Domenico Campagnola
Bacchic Scene
ca. 1520-25
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Heinrich Friedrich Füger
Mythological Scene
ca. 1800
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Tommaso Piroli
Theseus with slain Minotaur
(series, Antiquities of Herculaneum)
1789
etching
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Pierre Brébiette
Amphitrite assisting Venus descending from Shell Chariot
ca. 1640
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Marco Carlone
Mythological Figures
ca. 1775-80
watercolor and gouache on paper
(after antique wall painting from the Baths of Titus, Rome)
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Laurent-Honoré Marqueste
Perseus and Medusa
1875
plaster
Musée des Augustins de Toulouse

Rudolf Jettmar
Liberation of Prometheus
1910
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

The Greek revolution deserves its fame.  It is unique in the annals of mankind.  This should be acknowledged even by those who side with Plato in their taste for the archaic and ritualistic.  What makes it unique is precisely the directed efforts, the continued and systematic modifications of the schemata of conceptual art, till making was replaced by the matching of reality through the new skill of mimesis.  We mistake the character of this skill if we speak of the imitation of nature.  Nature cannot be imitated or "transcribed" without first being taken apart and put back together again.  This is not the work of observation alone but rather of ceaseless experimentation.  For here too, the term "observation" has tended to mislead rather than enlighten.  

There is no reason to think Greek artists offered a more complete or more accurate visual inventory of the world than did the art of Egypt, Mesopotamia, or Crete.  On the contrary, in these early cultures the schemata of animals and plants were often refined to an astounding degree.  . . .  After all, Greek art of the classical period concentrated on the portrayal of man almost to the exclusion of other motifs, and even in the portrayal of man it remained wedded to types. This does not apply only to the idealized type of physique which we all associate with Greek art.  Even in the rendering of movement and drapery the repertoire of Greek sculpture and painting has turned out to be strangely limited.  There are a restricted number of formulas for the rendering of figures standing, running, fighting, or falling, which Greek artists repeated with relatively slight variations over a long period of time.  Perhaps if a census of such motifs were taken, the Greek vocabulary would be found to be not much larger than the Egyptian.  

It is not even necessarily true that individual observations, such as the existence of shadows or of foreshortening, were never made by pre-Greek artists.  There are certain striking examples of such observations in Mexican art that would refute [Heinrich] Shäfer's contention that all such departures from conceptual modes are directly dependent on the Greek revolution.  But it was Shäfer himself who rightly pointed out that what is interesting in the isolated instances of such deviations, which can even be found in Egypt, is that they remained without consequence.  They do not become part of the tradition to be improved and extended, as they do in Greece.  On the contrary, one has the impression that they are accidents, random mutations, which are weeded out by a process of natural selection.  . . .  Maybe taboos played their part in this sorting-out process.  But most of all, we may assume, tradition itself had this effect.  Nothing succeeds like success, and nothing survives like survival.  The very fact that certain images had survived for immeasurable periods must have appeared as a token of their magic potency. 

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

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1944)

Milton Avery
The Baby
1944
oil on canvas
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio

Eugene Berman
Backdrop Design for Danses Concertantes by George Balanchine
1944
watercolor and gouache on paper
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Arshile Gorky
How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life
1944
oil on canvas
Seattle Art Museum

Hans Hofmann
Untitled
1944
gouache on paper
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Walt Kuhn
Acrobat in White and Silver
1944
oil on canvas
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Jacques Lipchitz
The Road to Exile
1944
etching, engraving and aquatint
Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia

Barbara Morgan
Berenice Abbott with a Cat
1944
gelatin silver print
Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia

Max Weber
Woman Carrying Picture
1944
oil on canvas
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Robert Motherwell
The Painter
1944
oil paint, crayon and collage on canvas
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Isamu Noguchi
Remembrance
1944
bronze
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Carl-Henning Pedersen
Untitled
1944
lithograph
NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Jackson Pollock
Untitled
1944
drawing
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Birger Sandzén
Autumn (Smoky Hill River, Kansas)
1944
oil on canvas, mounted on panel
Tacoma Art Museum

Houghton Cranford Smith
Near Los Andes
1944
oil on canvas
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

William Sommer
Portrait of Miss Eunice Merton
1944
watercolor on paper
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Paul Bough Travis
Still Life
1944
oil on panel
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

from Dichtung und Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem)

                                                              I

Expecting your arrival tomorrow, I find myself thinking I love You: then comes the thought – I should like to write a poem which would express exactly what I mean when I think these words.

                                                              II

Of any poem written by someone else, my first demand is that it be good (who wrote it is of secondary importance); of any poem written by myself, my first demand is that it be genuine, recognizable, like my handwriting, as having been written, for better or worse, by me. (When it comes to his own poems, a poet's preferences and those of his readers often overlap but seldom coincide.) 

                                                              III

But this poem which I should now like to write would not only have to be good and genuine: if it is to satisfy me, it must also be true.

     I read a poem by someone else in which he bids a tearful farewell to his beloved: the poem is good (it moves me as other good poems do) and genuine (I recognize the poet's "handwriting"). Then I learn from a biography that, at the time he wrote it, the poet was sick to death of the girl but pretended to weep in order to avoid hurt feelings and a scene. Does this information affect my appreciation of his poem? Not in the least: I never knew him personally and his private life is no business of mine. Would it affect my appreciation if I had written the poem myself? I hope so. 

– W.H. Auden (1959)