Giovanni Paolo Panini, Interior of the Pantheon, ca. 1734. In the National Gallery, Washington.
(Bonus: John Cale, “Magritte” (MP3, 6.9Mb, 4:58).)
Category Archives: images
failure in america
“I used to be fond of saying that America, which was supposed to be a land of success, was a land of failure. Most of the great men in America had a long life of early failure and a long life of later failure.”
(Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 88)
Bonus Steinage:
(The outside of the McCormack Family Theater, site of some of the recent Brown efest, not full of any great men (or women) as far as I could tell.)
the same again, sir? you can’t have the same again.
père ubu
(Dora Maar, Père Ubu, 1936)
two cathedrals by kupka
The color’s pretty ferociously botched on this (good job, MoMA): František Kupka’s Study in Verticals (The Cathedral), pastel on colored paper, 1912. In MoMA’s current drawing show.
Kukpa, Reminiscence of a Cathedral, oil on canvas, 1922–23. At the diacritically-challenged Art Institute of Chicago, turned up while looking for a better version of the MoMA drawing.
saint augustin et sa mère, sainte monique
Ary Scheffer, Saint Augustin et sa mère, Sainte Monique, 1846 (Paris: Musée du Louvre)
(found in Geoffrey Bennington & Jacques Derrida’s Jacques Derrida)
there is a chicken in here somewhere
(with a nod to Alex.)
three book covers in two languages
two trees by george maciunas
One night I was sleeping in the basement of 80 Wooster Street. I think it was the late Fall of 1967. George comes in, says, “Come help. I got these trees here, I have to plant them.”
“What, at this hour of night?” I hate to get up at night. But I did, and yes, he had these shabby trees lying on the sidewalk.
“I stole them from the parking lot on West Broadway,” he told me proudly, laughing. “They were digging up the whole place, with tractors, and I asked them to give me a couple of the trees, and they said no! So I waited until the night, and I took them, you see? We have to plant them now, it’s against the law to plant trees in SoHo.
The next day, or a day later, some city officials showed up. “No trees are permitted here,” they told me. “You’ll have to get rid of them.”
I go down to the basement, to George. He was making his Fluxus boxes or something, and he says, “Tell them if they don’t like our trees they can pull them out.” So I go back to the city officials, and I say: “No, George is not going to do it. He says you have to do it. And he wants me to take some pictures when you do it.”
The city people looked at me, then at each other, turned around, and we never saw them again.
But the trees grew and prospered. Big, big trees they are now, happy trees, the only trees on Wooster Street.
(Jonas Mekas, letter to Emmett Williams, 1993, in Mr. Fluxus: a collective portrait of George Maciunas 1931–1978)
statues of liberty
Marcel Duchamp’s cover for André Breton’s Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares (1946):
The cover of the first American edition of Michel Butor’s Mobile (1963), designed by Janet Halverson:
(I would have a better image of that, but there doesn’t seem to be one on the Internet and thieves stole the scanner cable, so the phone & Photoshop will have to do. Alas.)
One would imagine that someone would have similarly made a splendid cover for Kafka’s Amerika of the Statue of Liberty holding a sword aloft, but the closest one I can find is the New Directions cover by Gilda Kuhlman:
But the best cover for Amerika that I could find is the poster for this French theatrical version of the novel, which captures more of the novel’s spirit:
