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

attributed to Simone Bianco
Idealized Classical Head
ca. 1540
marble
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Carl Friedrich Lessing
Study of Classical Head
1825
drawing
Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio

Annibale Carracci
Classical Figure with Vessel
ca. 1595
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Arvid Fougstedt
Classical Motif
1931
etching
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Baccio Bandinelli
Frieze of Classical Figures
ca. 1519-25
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Marcantonio Raimondi after Francesco Francia
Bathing Scene with Classical Frieze Figures
ca. 1510
engraving
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Augustus John
Four Figures in Antique Dress
ca. 1891
drawing
Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, Wiltshire

Johann August Nahl the Younger
Two Women in Classical Draperies
before 1825
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Agostino Musi after Giulio Romano
Classical Couple holding Hands
ca. 1515-30
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Anonymous Printmaker after Franz Ludwig Catel
Roman Woman applying Cosmetics, assisted by Slave
ca. 1798
etching
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wulfenbüttel

Salomon Gessner
Classical Vignette for Winckelmann's Letters
ca. 1802-1803
etching
(posthumously printed)
Graphische Sammlung, Zentralbibliothek Zürich

Ciro Ferri
Classical Scene before Enthroned Figure
ca. 1675
drawing
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Federico Zuccaro
Classical Scene
(unidentified narrative)
ca. 1580
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Auguste-Barthélemy Glaize
Study for Classical Figure
ca. 1870
drawing
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes

Francisque Millet
Classical Landscape with Water-Carrier
ca. 1660-70
oil on canvas
Landesmuseum, Hannover

Étienne Allegrain
Classical Landscape with Ruins
ca. 1690
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

There is another famous passage in the writings of Pliny that also concerns an incomplete figure, but this time the appeal to the imagination is even greater: we hear that Timanthes painted the sacrifice of Iphigenia and expressed the grief of those around her in such a masterly way that when he came to represent her father Agamemnon, he had to suggest the climax of sorrow by representing him with his cloak drawn over his face, an enclosed world within the picture's world, which excited the admiration of the classical orators.  

There is a painting on one of the walls of a Pompeian house that reflects this motif.  It is not a great work of art, and the same criticism applies to many other copies of Greek works found in Italy and elsewhere.  But such criticism has tended to obscure the most astounding consequence of the Greek miracle: the fact that copies were ever made at all to be displayed in the houses and gardens of the educated.  For this industry of making reproductions for sale implies a function of the image of which the pre-Greek world knew nothing.  The image has been pried loose from the practical context for which it was conceived and is admired and enjoyed for its beauty and fame, that is, quite simply within the context of art.  For this is the final consequence of that great "chain reaction."  The creation of an imaginative realm led to an acknowledgement of what we call "art" and the celebration of those rare spirits who could explore and extend that realm.

It may sound paradoxical to say that the Greeks invented art, but from this point of view, it is a mere sober statement of fact.  We rarely realize how much this concept owes to the heroic spirit of those discoverers who were active between 550 and 350 B.C.  For the history of these years as it is reflected in Pliny or Quintilian was handed down like an epic of conquest, a story of inventions.  When Quintilian called the contorted attitude of Myron's Discobolos "particularly praiseworthy for its novelty and difficulty," he codified a standard of criticism that linked art with the solution of problems.  The names of the artists who discovered new effects to increase illusion and lifelikeness, the names of Myron and Phidias, Zeuxis and Apelles, lived on in history and have retained their magic despite the fact we do not know one work from their hands.  The legend of their triumphs remained as potent in the history of Western art as did the actual works that were recovered from the soil.  The writers of the Renaissance echoed the anecdotes that extolled the powers of painting to deceive the eye – the very character which made Plato disapprove of art and prefer the immutable laws of the Egyptian canon. 

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

Windbreak

Robert Adams
Remains of a Eucalyptus Windbreak - Redlands, California
1982
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Henri Matisse
La Coiffure
1901
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Roman Empire
Castor or Pollux
AD 150
marble
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Kasimir Malevich
Dynamic Suprematism
ca. 1915-16
oil on canvas
Tate Modern, London

Robert Adams
East Highlands, California
1983
gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Henri Matisse
Painter in the Studio
1916-17
oil on canvas
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris

Roman Empire
Isis
2nd century AD
marble
Museo Nacionale de Arte Romano, Mérida

Kasimir Malevich
Painterly Realism of Boy with Knapsack:
Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension
1915
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Robert Adams
The River's Edge
2015
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Henri Matisse
Odalisque with Tambourine
1925-26
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Roman Empire
Minerva (Palladium Form)
AD 100-150
marble
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

Kasimir Malevich
Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying
1915
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Robert Adams
Manzanita, Oregon
2004
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Henri Matisse
Seated Woman with Vase of Amaryllis
1941
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Roman Empire
Hero
1st-2nd century AD
marble
Harvard Art Museums

Kasimir Malevich
Suprematist Composition
1915
drawing
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Robert Adams
Westminster, California
1983
gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

from In Time of War

They died and entered the closed life like nuns:

Even the very poor lost something; oppression

Was no more a fact; and the self-centered ones

Took up an even more extreme position.

And the kingly and the saintly also were

Distributed among the woods and oceans,

And touch our open sorrow everywhere,

Airs, waters, places, round our sex and reasons;

Are what we feed on as we make our choice.

We bring them back with promises to free them,

But as ourselves continually betray them:

They hear their deaths lamented in our voice,

But in our knowledge know we could restore them;

They could return to freedom; they would rejoice.

– W.H. Auden (1938)

Proles

Vincent van Gogh
Woman planting Potatoes
1885
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Anonymous Dutch Artist after Jan Saenredam
Adam tilling the Soil
ca. 1650-1700
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Adam Elsheimer
Excavation of the True Cross
before 1610
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Tiburzio Passarotti
Youth lifting a Rock
ca. 1590
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anna Ancher
Harvest Time
1901
oil on canvas
Fuglsang Kunstmuseum, Lolland, Denmark

Franz Xaver Reinhold
Corn Harvest
ca. 1840
oil on paper, mounted on panel
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Hieronymus Hopfer after Marcantonio Raimondi
Harvesters overseen by Silenus and the Pope
ca. 1540
etching
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Anton Romako
Peasant Girl in the Roman Campagna
1873
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Adriaen van de Velde
Study of Farm Woman
before 1672
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Adriaen van de Velde
Peasant on Horseback
before 1672
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Sebald Beham
Farmer going to Market
1520
engraving
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

August Sander
Young Farmer
1912-13
gelatin silver print
Museum Folkwang, Essen

Daniel Steudner after Matthias Scheits
Winter
(series, The Four Seasons)
ca. 1515-20
etching
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Daniel Steudner after Matthias Scheits
Spring
(series, The Four Seasons)
ca. 1515-20
etching
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Leopold Kalckreuth
Sunday Afternoon
1893
oil on canvas
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Ludwig Johann Passini
Pumpkin Seller in Chioggia
1876
watercolor on paper
Belvedere Museum, Vienna

The next winter, Aristides, the son of Archippus, one of the commanders of a fleet which the Athenians had sent out to gather tribute from their confederates, apprehended Artaphernes, a Persian, in the town of Eion upon the river Strymon, going from the king to Lacedaemon.  When he was brought to Athens, the Athenians translated his letters out of the Assyrian language into Greek and read them; wherein, amongst many other things that were written to the Lacedaemonians, the principal was this: that he knew not what they meant, for many ambassadors came, but they spake not the same thing; if therefore they had any thing to say certain, they should send somebody to him with this Persian.  But Artaphernes they sent afterwards away in a galley, with ambassadors of their own, to Ephesus.  And there encountering the news that king Artaxerxes, the son of Xerxes, was lately dead (for about that time he died), they returned home.   

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