Deceptions

Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts - Trompe-l’oeil - second half of 17th century.jpg

Samuel Lewis - A Deception - ca. 1805-1808

Iurii Annenkov - Relief-Collage - 1919

Solely on its own terms

“It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at “abstract” or “non-objective” art-and poetry, too. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape-not its picture-is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars, or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.”
Clement Greenberg, Avant-garde and Kitsch, 1939. Partisan review p. 36.

Luigi Russolo - L'uomo morente - 1941

Kasimir Malevich - The Shroud of Christ - 1908

Paul Gauguin - The Loss of Virginity - 1890

My Landscape

"People are my landscape"

Isaiah Berlin

William-Adolphe Bouguereau - The Oreads - 1902

Horace Bristol - Melee in Shinto Temple, New Year's Day - Japan - 1946

The Sense of Wonder

"The suddenness, radical disorientation, the sensation to be withdrawn from the normal course of time, 

the intuitive certitude to have come in contact with a real ordinarily hidden, 
the overwhelming joy, the serenity, the sense of wonder." 

Michel Hulin, La Mystique Sauvage: Aux Antipodes de l'Esprit, translation mine. 

Gustav Klimt - Fish Blood - 1897-98

Jan Toorop - Fatalism - 1893

Kasimir Malevich - The Shroud of Christ - 1908