Morris Kantor

Morris Kantor
Society of Independent Artists
ca. 1918
linocut (exhibition poster)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
Force
1921
oil on linen
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
Synthetic Arrangement
1922
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
Reclining Nude
1927
oil on linen
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
Captain's House
1929
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
Woman Reading in Bed
1930
oil on linen
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
Still Life with Dogwood
1930
oil on linen
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
Interior
1931
oil on linen
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
The Brothers
1934
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
Baseball at Night
1934
oil on linen
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
Tension
1936
oil on linen
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Consuelo  Kanaga
Morris Kantor in his Studio, Cape Cod
1938
gelatin silver print
Archives of American Art, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
Girl with Cigarette
1940
oil on linen
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
Untitled (Monhegan Series)
1944
drawing
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
Untitled (Monhegan Series)
1944
drawing
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
Seashore
1953-54
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Morris Kantor
Triptych
1963
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Chorus from Oedipus

Fate is the master of everything    it is vain to fight against fate

from the beginning to the end the road is laid down     human

scheming is futile    worries are futile    prayers are futile

sometimes a man wins    sometimes he loses

who decides whether he loses or wins

it has all been decided long ago elsewhere

it is destiny

not a single man can alter it

all he can do is let it happen

the good luck the bad luck everything that happens

everything that seems to toss our days up and down

it is all there from the first moment

it is all there    tangled in the knotted mesh of causes

helpless to change itself

even the great god lies there entangled

helpless in the mesh of causes

and the last day lies tangled there with the first

a man's life is a pattern on the floor    like a maze

it is all fixed    he wanders in the pattern

no prayer can alter it

or help him to escape it    nothing

then fear can be the end of him

a man's fear of his fate is often his fate

leaping to avoid it    he meets it

– Seneca (4 BC-AD 65), translated by Ted Hughes (1969)

Expectedness (Sixties)

Jacob Lawrence
Dreams no. 2
1965
tempera on board
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

James Henry Daugherty
Tensions and Rhythms
1968-69
oil on linen
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Sam Byrne
Dust Storm approaching Broken Hill
ca. 1960-65
enamel on board
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Australia

Arthur Osver
The Voyage
1961
oil paint and collage on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Jack Humphrey
Perry Point Ferry
1960
oil on canvas
New Brunswick Museum, Saint John

Perry Nichols
The Desk-Top of Jake Hamon
1966
oil on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art

John Hultberg
Monhegan Dock
1961
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

John Hultberg
Plain with Flag
ca. 1960
gouache on board
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

John Fox
Atelier Rouge
ca. 1965
oil on canvas
Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick

Donald Friend
Mountebanks
1965
lithograph
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Hassel Smith
Mousehole, Cornwall
1962
oil on canvas
Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona

Harry Soviak
Famille Noire
1968
lithograph
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Jan Forsberg
Gust of Wind
1963
etching and aquatint
Art Institute of Chicago

Danny Lyon
Robert Frank and Mary Frank
1969
gelatin silver print
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Helen Lessore
Portrait of art collector David Wilkie
1967
oil on canvas
Tate Modern, London

Eva Kubbos
The Sudden Wings of Blue
1962
color linocut
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Eikoh Hosoe
Kamaitachi #26
1963
gelatin silver print
National Museum of Asian Art, Washington DC

POE, EDGAR (1809-1849) – The greatest master of original prosodic effect that the United States have produced, and an instinctively and generally right (though, in detail, hasty, ill-informed, and crude) essayist on points of prosodic doctrine.  Produced little, and that little not always equal; but at his best an unsurpassable master of music in verse and phrase. 

PRAED, WINTHROP MACKWORTH (1802-1839) – An early nineteenth-century Prior.  Not incapable of serious verse, and hardly surpassed in laughter.  His greatest triumph, the adaptation of the three-foot anapest, alternately hypercatalectic and acatalectic or exact, which had been a ballad-burlesque metre as early as Gay, had been partly ensouled by Byron in one piece, but was made his own by Praed, and handed down by him to Mr. Swinburne to be yet further sublimated. 

– George Saintsbury, from Historical Manual of English Prosody (1910)

Expectedness (Sixties)

Bob Thompson
Enchanted Rider
1961
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Bob Thompson
An Allegory
1964
oil on linen
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Bob Thompson
Descent from the Cross
1963
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Arnold Belkin
In Resplendent Places
1968
lithograph
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Arnold Belkin
Moses de Leon
1969
lithograph
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Gertrude Hermes
Bees
1963
color linocut
British Museum

Elaine Lustig Cohen
Boris Pasternak - I Remember
1960
lithograph (dust jacket)
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Elaine Lustig Cohen
The Hebrew Bible, Jewish Museum, New York
1963
offset-lithograph (exhibition poster)
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Jack Beal
Still Life with Plant and Mirrors
1965
oil on canvas
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Galina Bitt
Kinetische Zeichnung
1965
screenprint
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Cristóbal Balenciaga
Hat
1964
dyed cockerel feathers mounted on rayon taffeta
Museo Cristóbal Balenciaga, Getaria, Spain

William Turnbull
Leaves, Blue
ca. 1967
lithograph
Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia

Bridget Riley
Late Morning
1967-68
acrylic on canvas
Tate Modern, London

Ruth Gikow
The Kitchen
1960
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Corneille (Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo)
L'Heure Matinale
1967
lithograph
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane

Pablo Picasso
Dans l'Atelier
1965
aquatint and drypoint
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

David Plowden
Delaware and Hudson Railroad
Whitehall, New York
1965
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

DRYDEN, JOHN (1630-1700) – The establisher and master of the stopped heroic couplet with variations of triplets and Alexandrines; the last great writer of dramatic blank verse, after he had given up the couplet for that use; master also of any other metre – the stopped heroic quatrain, lyrics of various forms, etc. – that he chose to try.  A deliberate student of prosody, on which he had intended to leave a treatise, but did not. 

COWPER, WILLIAM (1731-1800) – One of the first to protest, definitely and by name, against the "mechanic art" of Pope's couplet.  He himself returned to Dryden for that metre; but practised very largely in blank verse, and wrote lyrics with great sweetness, a fairly varied command of metre, and, in "Boadicea," "The Castaway," and some of his hymns, no small intensity of tone and cry.  His chief shortcoming, a preference of elision to substitution.  

– George Saintsbury, from Historical Manual of English Prosody (1910)