 |
| Jean-Victor Bertin (France) Entry to the Park at St Cloud 1810 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
"In one sense, I'm probably interested in the past because of this. I'm not at all interested in the past to try to bring it back to life but because it's dead. There's no teleology of resurrection there, but rather the realization that the past is dead. Starting from that death, we can say absolutely serene things, completely analytic and anatomical, not directed toward a possible repetition or resurrection. And for that reason as well, nothing is of less interest to me than the desire to rediscover in the past the secret of origin."
 |
| John Constable (England) The Lock 1824 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
 |
| Samuel Palmer (England) Landscape with Barn, Shoreham, Kent ca. 1828 watercolor Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
"I'd say that writing, for me, is associated with death, maybe essentially the death of others, but this doesn't mean that writing would be like killing others and carrying out against them, against their existence, a definitively lethal gesture that would hunt them from presence, that would open a sovereign and free space before me. Not at all. For me, writing means having to deal with the death of others, but it basically means having to deal with others to the extent that they're already dead. In one sense, I'm speaking over the corpse of the others. I have to admit that I'm postulating their death to some extent. In speaking of them, I'm in the situation of the anatomist who performs an autopsy. With my writing I survey the body of others, I incise it, I lift the integuments and skin, I try to find the organs and, in exposing the organs, reveal the site of the lesion, the seat of pain, that something that has characterized their life, their thought, and which, in its negativity, has finally organized everything they've been. The venomous heart of things and men is, at bottom, what I've always tried to expose."
– from Speech Begins after Death, text of a 1968 interview with Michel Foucault (1926-1984) conducted by Claude Bonnefoy, edited by Philippe Artières, translated by Robert Bononno, published in English by University of Minnesota Press in 2013
 |
| Karl Friedrich Lessing (Germany) Landscape with Crows ca. 1830 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
 |
| Christian E.B. Morgenstern (Germany) Oaks beside water 1832 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
 |
| Carl Gustave Carus (Germany) Colosseum by night, Rome ca. 1830-35 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| August Matthias Hagen (Germany) Mountains 1835 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| JMW Turner (England) Landscape with river and bay in background 1835-40 canvas Louvre, Paris |
 |
| Gustaf Wilhelm Palm (Sweden) View of Arricia 1841 oil on paper, mounted on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
 |
| Théodore Rousseau (France) View of the plain, Montmartre ca. 1848 oil on panel Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
 |
| Eugène-Joseph Berboeckhoven and Joseph Quinaux (Belgium) Landscape with herd ca. 1860-65 oil on panel Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| Andreas Achenbach (Germany) Landscape with river 1866 oil on panel Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| Gustave Courbet (France) La Brème 1866 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
 |
| Vincent van Gogh (Netherlands) Landscape with house and ploughman 1889 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |