Naked of worship

Photographer unknown - D.H.Lawrence and his sister Ada Clarke - Mablethorpe beach, Lincolnshire - 1926

To wipe away the Entire Horizon

"But how did we do this ? How were we able to drink up the sea? 

Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?"

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125, 1882

Erik Bulatov - Horizon - 1971/72 (via artdaily)

Kazimir Malevich - Red Cavalery - 1928/32

Ferdinand Hodler - Lake Geneve with Jura - 1911

Stretching his Hand to the Master of Things

“In place of a romantic, an idealist, an aristocratic dreamer about pure symbol, about abstract aesthetics of the word, in place of symbolism, futurism and imaginism, arrived a living poetry of the word-object, and its creator is not an idealist-dreamer Mozart, but a rigorous and severe artist-master Salieri, stretching his hand to the master of things and materialistic values, to the builder and producer of the material (reified) world.“ 
Ossip Mandelstam, O prirode slovaб 1922, 
quoted and translated in Edward Możejko, “Tracing the Modernist Paradigm” 
in Modernism, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson, 2007 vol.1

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy - Unnown Photographer - 1937

via moholy-nagy.org

Contemplating Itself

”But even as you enjoy the contemplation of such romantic mirages as beauty and pleasure; so would I enjoy the contemplation of that which interests me above all things: namely, Life: the force that ever strives to attain greater power of contemplating itself.” 

George Bernard Shaw, Don Juan in Hell, in Man and Superman, 1903

Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Taeuber-Arp - Carnac - 1929

via Archive Dada

Essential Quality of being present

"The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present."

Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 1863

Charles Demuth and Eugen O'Neill - ProvinceTown - ca. 1915?

Via Province Town Playhouse

The End of a World and the Birth of Another

"We are living an epoch both dangerous 

and magnificent which embraces

desperately the end of a world and

the birth of another - a seeming confusion 

is its most immediate appearance."

Fernand Léger, 1947, in Maurice Fréchuret, 

Catalogue du Musée National Fernand Léger, 2006

Cornelis Van Eesteren & Frieda Fluck - Ascona - 1927

via Charnel House (again!)

The Last of its Kind

“What is décadence? It is the keenest sense of organic connection with the monumental legacy of the high culture of the past, along with the painfully proud awareness that we are the last of its kind.”

Viacheslav Ivanov and M. O. Gershenson, Perepiska iz Dvukh Uglov, 1921

quoted by Andrei Ariev in The Intelligentsia without Revolution: The Culture of the Silver Age

Francisco Goya - The Dog - 1819

J. M. W. Turner - Three Seascapes - 1827

J. A. Whistler - Colour Scheme for the dining room of Aubrey House - 1873

Monuments of a Historical Consciousness

“The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do not measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years.” 

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940
quoted in Roger Griffin, A Fascist Century, 2008

F.T. Marinetti and Thayaht

Traffic

"On that 1st of October, 1924, I was assisting in the titanic rebirth of a new phenomenon... traffic."

Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow. 1924, quoted in All That is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman, 1982

Cornelis Van Eesteren - Schematic representation of the optimal relationship between skyscrapers and traffic - 1926

Le Corbusier - La Cité Radieuse - 1924

Emilio Ambasz - Cooperative of a Mexican-American grape growers in California - 1979

Where form can be formless

"To us today there is no doubt that Greek artis an insistence that the sense of exaltation is to be found in perfect form, that exaltation is the same as ideal sensibility, in contrast, for examle, with the Gothic or Baroque, in which the sublime consists of a desire to destroy form, where form can be formless."

Barnett Newman, The Sublime is Now, 1948

Gustave Courbet - Bord de mer à Palavas - 1868

Barnett Newmann - Untitled (Stations of the Cross) - 1946 (?) sideways

Yuu Sakai - Untitled (via Minimal Exposition)

Erik Bulatov - Horizon - 1971/72 (via artdaily)

"A culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the protospirituality of 
ever-childish humanity and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal 
thing from the boundless and enduring."
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 1918