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)

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)

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1943)

Barbara Morgan
Amaryllis Seed Pod
1943
gelatin silver print
Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia

Alice Neel
Julie and the Doll
1943
oil on canvas
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Pablo Picasso
Buffet: Still Life with Glasses and Cherries
1943
oil on canvas
Menil Collection, Houston

Edward Weston
Neil
1943
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Josef Albers
Untitled
1943
oil on board
Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina

Esther Bubley
Spectators at Memorial Day Services, Arlington Cemetery
1943
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Marsden Hartley
Roses
1943
oil on canvas
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

George Platt Lynes
Marsden Hartley
1943
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Robert Motherwell
Untitled
1943
watercolor and ink on paper
Menil Collection, Houston

George Lovett Kingsland Morris
House-to-House Fighting
1943
oil on canvas
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Kenneth Heilbron
Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, Savannah, Illinois
1943
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Frederick Carder
Head
1943
cast glass
Wichita Art Museum, Kansas

Georges Braque
Pitcher, Candlestick and Black Fish
1943
oil on canvas
Menil Collection, Houston

Opal Fleckenstein
Mountain Snows
1943
watercolor on paper
Seattle Art Museum

Helen Spang Pearce
Devil Flower
1943
oil on panel
Dallas Museum of Art

Raphael Soyer
Farewell
1943
lithograph
Wright Museum of Art, Beloit, Wisconsin

Dame Kind

Steatopygous, sow-dugged

                                        and owl-headed, 

To Whom – Whom else? – the first innocent blood

                                        was formally shed 

By a chinned mammal that hard times

                                        had turned carnivore,

From Whom his first promiscuous orgy

                                        begged a downpour

To speed the body-building cereals

                                        of a warmer age:

Now who put us, we should like to know,

                                        in Her manage? 

Strait-laced She never was

                                        and has not grown more so,

Since the skeptical academies got wind

                                        of the Chi-Rho

St Cuckoo's wooden church for Her

                                        where on Green Sundays

Bald hermits celebrate a wordless

                                        cult in Her praise:

So pocket your fifty sonnets, Bud;

                                        tell her a myth

Of unpunishable gods and all the girls

                                        they interfered with.  

Haven't we spotted Her Picked Winners

                                        whom she cossets, ramparts

And does the handsome by? Didn't the darlings

                                        have cold hearts?

. . . ONE BOMB WOULD BE ENOUGH. . . . Now look

                                        who's thinking gruesome!

Brother, you're worse than a lonesome Peeper

                                        or a He-Virgin

Who nightly abhors the Primal Scene

                                        in medical Latin:

She mayn't be all She might be but

                                        She is our Mum.

You can't tell us your hypochondriac 

                                        Blue-Stocking from Provence

Who makes the clock-work arcadies go round

                                        is worth tuppence;

You won't find a steady in that museum

                                        unless your prefer

Tea with a shapeless angel to bedtime

                                        with a lovely monster:

Before you catch it for your mim look

                                        and gnostic chirrup,

Ask the Kind Lady who fitted you out

                                        to fix you up.

Supposing even (through misdirections

                                        or your own mischief)

You do land in that anomalous duchy,

                                        Her remotest fief,

Where four eyes encounter in two

                                        one mirror perilous

As the clear rock-basin that stultified

                                        frigid Narcissus,

Where tongues stammer on a First Name,

                                        bereft of guile,

And common snub-nosed creatures are abashed

                                        at a face in profile,

Even there, as your blushes invoke its Guardian

                                        (whose true invocable

Name is singular for each true heart

                                        and false to tell)

To sacre your courtship ritual so

                                        it deserves a music

More solemn than the he-hawing

                                        of a salesman's limerick,

Do a bow to the Coarse Old Party that wrought you

                                        an alderliefest

Of the same verbose and sentient kidney,

                                        grateful not least

For all the dirty work She did.

                                        How many hundreds

Of lawful, unlawful, both equally

                                        loveless beds,

Of lying endearments, crooked questions,

                                        crookeder answers,

Of bawling matches, sarcastic silences,

                                        megrims, tears,

How much half-witted horse-play and sheer

                                        bloody misrule

It took to bring you two together

                                        both on schedule?       

– W.H. Auden (1959)

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)