Wassily Kandinsky, Moscow, Red Square, 1916 (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow).
Barbara Guest’s “The View from Kandinsky’s Window” (published in Fair Realism, 1989):
An over-large pot of geraniums on the ledge
the curtains part
a view from Kandinsky’s window.The park shows little concern with Kandinsky’s history
these buildings are brief about his early life,
refelctions of him seen from the window
busy with preparations for exile
the relevance of the geranium color.Partings, future projects
exceptional changes are meant to occur,
he will rearrange spatial dimensions
the geranium disappears, so shall a person.His apartment looking down on a Square
the last peek of Russia
an intimate one knowing equipment vanishes.At Union Square the curtains are drawn
diagonals greet us, those curves and sharp city
vertical he taught us their residual movements.The stroke of difficult white finds an exit
the canvas is clean, pure and violent
a rhythm of exile in its vein,We have similar balconies, scale
degrees of ingress, door knobs, daffodils
like Kandinsky’s view from his window
distance at the street end.
Paul Klee, The Golden Fish, 1925 (Kunsthalle, Hamburg).
Extract from “Twilight Polka Dots,” by Barbara Guest (published in Fair Realism, 1989):
The lake was filled with distinguished fish purchased
at much expense in their prime. It was a curious lake, half salt,
wishing to set a tone of solitude edged with poetry.
This was a conscious body aware of shelves and wandering
rootlings, duty suggested it provide a scenic atmosphere
of content, a solicitude for the brooding emotions.It despised the fish who enriched the waters. Fish with
their lithesome bodies, and their disagreeable concern
with feeding. They disturbed the water which preferred
the cultivated echoes of a hunting horn. Inside a
mercantile heart the lake dwelt on boning and deboning,
skin and sharpened eyes, a ritual search through
dependable deposits for slimier luxuries. The surface
presented an appeal to meditation and surcease.
Henri Matisse, Blue Still Life, 1907 (Barnes Foundation, Lincoln University).
“Words,” by Barbara Guest (published in Fair Realism, 1989).
The simple contact with a wooden spoon and the word
recovered itself, began to spread as grass, forced
as it lay sprawling to consider the monument where
patience looked at grief, where warfare ceased
eyes curled outside themes to search the paper
now gleaming and potent, wise and resilient, word
entered its continent eager to find another as
capable as a thorn. The nearest possession would
house them both, they being then two might glide
into this house and presently create a rather larger
mansion filled with spoons and condiments, gracious
as a newly laid table where related objects might gather
to enjoy the interplay of gravity upon facetious hints,
the chocolate dish presuming an endowment, the ladle
of galactic rhythm primed as a relish dish, curved
knives, finger bowls, morsel carriages words might
choose and savor before swallowing so much was the
sumptuousness and substance of a rented house where words
placed dressing gowns as rosemary entered their scent
percipient as elder branches in the night where words
gathered, warped, then straightened, marking new wands.
Arnold Schönberg, The Red Gaze, 1910 (Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich).
“The Red Gaze,” by Barbara Guest (published in The Red Gaze, 2005).
Red, purple, brown Guardian leaf.
Complications of red enter the leaf
and it is more accomplished,
turning brown then gray in varying attitudes
after the snow begins. Colorful complications
disturb serenity, causing our eye
to wander over the shaking tree.Morning began with a concert of white.
Blue enters later.
Image via Pollen via False Arms.
The opening stanza from Barbara Guest’s “The Interruptions,” published in Moscow Mansions (1973):
It is a landscape by Baudelaire
his îles, his fantõmes, his sang
the faithful birds with their quick orgasm
the agility of the wave that attacks and plunders
bruised bones, pallor and sleeplessness,
the fresh sand the treading skies and Spring
a murderess in her photographer’s gown
Cindy Sherman, Untitled 316, 1995 (Metro Pictures Gallery)
Jay Bernstein writes:
In Untitled 316, which is a doll face in close-up, turning the whole doll thereby into a mask, Sherman potently captures this duality within the mask by providing a layering of masks, revealing below a smooth outer surface (mask) another mask, scarred, pitted, ravaged — the inner mask the truth of the outer mask, the layers of masking replicating the history of the mask. The ravaged mask animates the smooth surface mask, making the latter the repudiation of the former. And, of course, the eyes of this doll are human eyes, no longer frightened or stiffened — it is too late for that — but unutterably sad. Kafka eyes.
Otto Dix, To Beauty, 1922 (Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal).
Georg Simmel writes:
As a result, in order that this most personal element be saved, extremities and particularities and individualizations must be produced and they must be over-exaggerated merely to be brought into the awareness even of the individual himself. The atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture lies at the root of the bitter hatred which the preachers of the most extreme individualism, in the footsteps of Nietzsche, directed against the metropolis. But it is also the explanation of why indeed they are so passionatedly loved in the metropolis and indeed appear to its residents as the saviours of their unsatisfied yearnings.
Ernst Kirchner, Nollendorfplatz, 1912 (Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin).
Georg Simmel writes:
…the metropolis is the proper arena for this type of culture which has outgrown every personal element. Here in buildings and in educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technique, in the formations of social life and in the concrete institutions of the State is to be found such a tremendous richness of crystallizing, de-personalized cultural accomplishments that the personality can, so to speak, scarcely maintain itself in the fact of it. From one angle life is made infinitely more easy in the sense that stimulations, interests, and the taking up of time and attention present themselves from all sides and carry in it a stream which scarcely requires any individual efforts for its ongoing. But from another angle, life is composed more and more of these impersonal cultural elements and existing goods and values which seek to suppress personal interests and incomparabilities.
Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 2010 (exhibited as part of The Ephemeral).
Georg Simmel writes:
The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life. The antagonism represents the most modern form of the conflict which primitive man must carry on with nature for his own bodily existence. The eighteenth century may have called for liberation from all the ties which grew up historically in politics, in religion, in morality and in economics in order to permit the original natural virtue of man, which is equal in everyone, to develop without inhibition; the nineteenth century may have sought to promote, in addition to man’s freedom, his individuality (which is connected with the division of labor) and his achievements which make him unique and indispensable but which at the same time make him so much the more dependent on the complementary activity of others; Nietzsche may have seen the relentless struggle of the individual as the prerequisite for his full development, while socialism found the same thing in the suppression of all competition - but in each of these the same fundamental motive was at work, namely the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.
Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942 - 3 (MOMA).
Georg Simmel writes:
The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli. Man is a creature whose existence is dependent on differences, i.e., his mind is stimulated by the difference between present impressions and those which have preceded. Lasting impressions, the slightness in their differences, the habituated regularity of their course and contrasts between them, consume, so to speak, less mental energy than the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli. To the extent that the metropolis creates these psychological conditions — with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life — it creates in the sensory foundations of mental life, and in the degree of awareness necessitated by our organization as creatures dependent on differences, a deep contrast with the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence.