Comme il faut

Anonymous German Artist
Künstler-Redoute, Centraltheater Leipzig
ca. 1903
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Curt Behrends
Heute gehen wir zur Rollschuh Bahn
ca. 1910
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Henri Chachoin
La Teddy
(brand of suspenders)
ca. 1925
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Hans Rudi Erdt
Wintersport in Saarow
1911
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Joseph J. Gould
Lippincott's - October
1896
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Dudley Hardy
Cinderella - Drury Lane
1896
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Josef Rudolf Witzel
Wienrestaurant Volkstheater
1908
lithograph
(poster - proof before lettering)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Ludwig Hohlwein
Boll's Kindergarderobe, Munich
1908
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Ernst Heilemann
Wolfframm Piano, Dresden
1903
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Ernst Deutsch (called Dryden)
Der Trainer
(silent film)
1914
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolf Höfer
E.O. Merzbacher Furs, Munich
ca. 1909-1911
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Moritz Veit
Mademoiselle Milly Dagmar and her Performing Dogs
1906
lithograph
(poster - proof before lettering)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Edward Penfield
Harper's - Christmas
1896
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Emile Schneider
Strasbourg Tramline - Timetable
1897
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Ludwig Hohlwein
Tanz-Palast Blumen-Säle
1913
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anonymous British Artist
The New Woman has Arrived
ca. 1896
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

And just as the historian can never explain the individual work of art with all the decisions involved in making it, so the psychologist can never fully interpret its meaning to the questioning art lover.  This admission may come as a surprise to any reader who has felt troubled by so much rationalism in the face of art.  Yet it is rational, I think, to maintain that the meaning of human expression will always elude scientific explanation.  Have we not seen that our responses to facial expressions or speech sounds are always immediate, global, unanalyzed, and in that sense intuitive?  Where we understand we understand directly, as we understand the meaning of a musical phrase or the inflection of a voice.  The mystic and irrationalist errs only in thinking that such intuition must always be superior to reason, infallible.  There are misunderstandings of expression as there are other false responses.  The rational approach can help to eliminate such mistakes by showing what a work of art cannot have meant within the framework of its style and situation.  Having thus narrowed down the area of misunderstandings it must retire; for the particular in all its richness is bound to slip through the clumsy net of general concepts which we make by asking our twenty questions.  Created as a tool to help us find our way through the world of things, our language is notoriously poor when we try to analyze and categorize the inner world.

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

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1963)

Neil Williams
Marine Street
1963
acrylic on canvas
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

Ben Vautier
Sculpture Vivante
1963
letterpress (exhibition poster)
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Maija Isola for Marimekko (Finland)
Ananas
1963
screen-printed cotton fabric-panel
Art Institute of Chicago

William Ronald
Akira
1963
acrylic on canvas
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

Larry Rivers
Portrait of Sunny Norman: Parts of the Face
1963
oil on canvas
New Orleans Museum of Art

Martial Raysse
Visage en Bleu
1963
photo-collage and acrylic paint on canvas
Institut Valencià d'Art Modern

Robert Rauschenberg
Manuscript
1963
oil on canvas
Seattle Art Museum

Howard Rackliffe
Norse (Inland Water, Bucksport, Maine)
1963
gouache on board
New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut

Pablo Picasso
The Flowered Hat
1963
linocut
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, New York

Pablo Picasso
Painter and Model
1963
oil on canvas
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

John Pellew
Metropolitan
1963
watercolor on paper
New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut

Charles Cropper Parks
Watersprite of the Brandywine
1963
bronze
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

Jules Olitski
Wildcatter
1963
acrylic on canvas
Bennington Museum, Vermont

Beni Montresor
Stage Design for opera The Last Savage
1963
watercolor on paper
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Knox Martin
Phonograph Record
1963
oil enamel and wax on board
Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami

Sergio Larraín
Boys in Valparaiso Chile
1963
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

from Horae Canonicae

                                      V. VESPERS (part I)

     If the hill overlooking our city has always been known as Adam's

Grave, only at dusk can you see the recumbent giant, his head turned to

the west, his right arm resting for ever on Eve's haunch,

     can you learn, from the way he looks up at the scandalous pair, what a

citizen really thinks of his citizenship,

     just as now you can hear in a drunkard's caterwaul his rebel sorrows

crying for a parental discipline, in lustful eyes perceive a disconsolate

soul,

     scanning with desperation all passing limbs for some vestige of her

faceless angel who in that long ago when wishing was a help mounted her

once and vanished:

     For Sun and Moon supply their conforming masks, but in this hour of

civil twilight all must wear their own faces.

     And it is now that our two paths cross.

     Both simultaneously recognize his Anti-type: that I am an Arcadian,

that he is a Utopian.

     He notes, with contempt, my Aquarian belly: I note, with alarm, his

Scorpion's mouth.

     He would like to see me cleaning latrines: I would like to see him re-

moved to some other planet.

     Neither speaks. What experience could we possibly share?

     Glancing at a lampshade in a store window, I observe it is too hideous

for anyone in their senses to buy. He observes it is too expensive for a

peasant to buy.

     Passing a slum child with rickets, I look the other way: He looks the

other way if he passes a chubby one.

     I hope our senators will behave like saints, provided they don't reform

me: He hopes they will behave like baritoni cattivi, and, when lights burn

late in the Citadel, 

     I (who have never seen the inside of a police station) am shocked and

think, "Were the city as free as they say, after sundown all her bureaus

would be huge black stones."

     He (who has been beaten up several times) is not shocked at all but

thinks, "One fine night our boys will be working up there." 

– W.H. Auden (1950)

Ink

Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Self Portrait
ca. 1760
ink and wash on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Henri Matisse
Dahlias and Pomegranates
1947
ink on paper
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Lyubov Popova
Long Live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!
(stage design for The Earth in Turmoil)
1923
ink and collage on paper
Museum of Modern Art, New York

John Faber the Elder
Portrait of a Man
1702
ink on vellum
British Museum

Lievin Cruyl
Piazza di S. Pietro, Rome
ca. 1664-70
ink on paper
British Museum

John Brown
Shoemaker's Room in Leicester Square
formerly used as Observatory by Isaac Newton
ca. 1857
ink and wash on paper
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Charles-Louis Clérisseau
Roman Fountain
ca. 1765-70
ink and watercolor on paper
British Museum

Charles-Louis Clérisseau
Temple of the Sibyl, Tivoli
ca. 1765-70
ink and watercolor on paper
British Museum

Willem van Nieulandt the Younger
Wooded Mountain Path
before 1635
ink and watercolor on paper
British Museum

Belisario Corenzio
Bishop-Saint in Heaven with Saints and Angels
before 1643
ink and wash on paper - design for vault decoration
British Museum

Joseph Middleton Jopling
Queen Victoria reviewing Troops
ca. 1845
ink and watercolor on paper
British Museum

Marino Marini
Acrobats and Horse
1951
ink and gouache on canvas
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

David Bomberg
Family Group 7
1919
ink and wash on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Mario Carreño
Sugar Cane Cutters
1943
ink and gouache on paper
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Kurt Seligmann
Season's Greetings
1961-62
ink and crayon on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

William Baziotes
Puppets
1947
ink and watercolor on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Hannah Höch
Postcard to the artist's sister
1964
ink and watercolor on card
Museum of Modern Art, New York

from Prometheus Unbound

Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest

    Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,

And the souls of whom thou lovest

    Walk upon the winds with lightness,

Till they fail, as I am failing,

Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!

– Percy Bysshe Shelley (1820)

Visual Preferences (20th Century: 1953)

Richard Anuszkiewicz
Open Door
1953
oil on board
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Hans Arp
Aquatic
1953
marble
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Stern Bramson
Party for Employees and Families, National Cash Register Corporation
1953
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Byron Browne
Dance of Bacchus
1953
oil on canvas
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

Harry Callahan
Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago
1953
gelatin silver print
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Freddy Dosh
Still Life
1953
oil on board
Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands

Louis Fernandez
Buste de femme nue
1953
oil on canvas
Menil Collection, Houston

Auguste Herbin
Fou
1953
screenprint
Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami

Osbert Lancaster
Stage Design for Stravinsky opera The Rake's Progress
1953
watercolor, gouache and collage on paper
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas

Leon Levinstein
Coney Island
1953
gelatin silver print
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Michael Loew
Diagonal Space Elements #2
1953
oil on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art

Luigi Lucioni
Still Life with Leaves
1953
oil on canvas
Fleming Museum of Art, Burlington, Vermont

Veikko Marttinen
Composition
1953
oil on panel
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Henri Matisse
Ivy in Flower
1953
painted paper collage mounted on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art

Rollie McKenna
The Castle at Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, Wales
1953
gelatin silver print
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Mark Rothko
Untitled
1953
oil on canvas
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

from Dichtung und Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem)

                                                          

                                                           XXX

Autobiographers are just like other historians: some are Whigs, some Tories, some Geistesgeschichtswissenshaftler, some Feuilletonistes, etc. (I should like to believe that I think I love You more as De Tocqueville might have thought it than De Maistre.)

                                                          XXXI

The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist. (It is relatively easy to guess when one should think as a physician.)

                                                          XXXII

Who am I? (Was ist denn eigentlich mit mir geschehen?) Several answers are plausible, but there can no more be one definitive answer than there can be one definitive history of the Thirty Years' War. 

                                                          XXXIII

Alas, it is as impossible that my answer to the question Who are You? and your answer to the question "Who am I?" should be the same as that either of them should be exactly and completely true. But if they are not the same, and neither is quite true, then my assertion I love You cannot be quite true either. 

                                                          XXXIV

"I love you"; "Je t'aime"; "Ich liebe Dich"; "Io t'amo" . . . there is no language on earth into which this phrase cannot be exactly translated, on condition that, for what is meant by it, speech is unnecessary, so long as, instead of opening his mouth, the speaker might equally well point a finger first at himself, then at "You" and follow this up with a gesture in imitation of the act of "making love".

Under these conditions the phrase is devoid both of I-feeling and You-feeling; "I" means "this" member of the human race (not my drinking companion or the bartender), "You" means "that" member of the human race (not the cripple to your left, the baby to your right or the old crone behind you) and "love" identifies "which" physical need I am at this moment the passive victim of (I am not asking the way to a good restaurant or the nearest W.C.).

– W.H. Auden (1959)