Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Twenties Art

William Robert
Athletes Exercising in a Gymnasium
1920
watercolor
Tate, London

Roger Fry
Still-life with T'ang Horse
ca. 1920-21
oil on canvas
Tate, London

Glyn Warren Philpot
Three Figures
ca. 1921
chalk and watercolor on paper
Tate, London

Henri Braakensiek
Chestnut Blossom
1922
lithograph
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Dora Carrington
Farm at Watendlath
1921
oil on canvas
Tate, London

Dora Carrington
Spanish Landscape with Mountains
ca. 1924
oil on canvas
Tate, London

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, – but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love, –
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

– Edna St. Vincent Millay (1928)

Georgia O'Keeffe
Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow
ca. 1923
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Georgia O'Keeffe
Two Calla Lilies on Pink
1928
oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Pierre Bonnard
Nude in the Bath
1925
oil on canvas
Tate, London

El Lissitzky
Title-page for designs from the opera Victory over the Sun
1923
lithograph
Tate, London

René Magritte
Man with a Newspaper
1928
oil on canvas
Tate, London

The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad

The time of year has grown indifferent.
Mildew of summer and the deepening snow
Are both alike in the routine I know:
I am too dumbly in my being pent.

The wind attendant on the solstices
Blows on the shutters of the metropoles,
Stirring no poet in his sleep, and tolls
The grand ideas of the villages.

The malady of the quotidian . . .
Perhaps if summer ever came to rest
And lengthened, deepened, comforted, caressed
Through days like oceans in obsidian

Horizons, full of night's midsummer blaze;
Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate
Through all its purples to the final slate,
Persisting bleakly in an icy haze;

One might in turn become less diffident,
Out of such mildew plucking neater mould
And spouting new orations of the cold.
One might. One might. But time will not relent.

– Wallace Stevens (1921)

Matthew Smith
Peonies
1928
oil on canvas
Tate, London

Edouard Antonin Vysekal
The Herwigs
1928
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Francis Bacon
Painted Screen
ca. 1929
oil on panels
Tate, London
on long-term loan from a private collection