Julie Mehretu (1970 - )

Wikipedia page for Julie Mehretu

The Green Fields of France

I've recently been working on something about WWI and these seemed appropriate

The Green Fields of France

Hiroshi Yoshida (1876 - 1950)

Hiroshi Yoshida's Wikipedia page

Morris Lewis (1912 - 1962)

Wikipedia page for Morris Lewis

Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944)

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

---

Theodore Roethke (1908 - 1963)
In a Dark Time

Images of men - William Gale Gedney (1932 - 1989)

William Gedney made two trips to eastern Kentucky. In the summer of 1964, he traveled to the Blue Diamond Mining Camp in Leatherwood, Kentucky and stayed for awhile at the home of Boyd Couch, head of the local United Mine Workers Union. Then Gedney met Willie Cornett, who was recently laid off from the mines, his wife Vivian, and their twelve children. He soon moved in with the Cornett family, staying with them for eleven days. Twenty-two of the photographs from Gedney's 1964 visit to Kentucky were included in his one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (December 1968 through March 1969). Gedney corresponded with the Cornetts over many years, and finally returned to Kentucky to visit and photograph the family again in 1972. In his notebooks Gedney writes about these lives he witnessed and photographed, the complicated relationships within such large families, the importance of the automobile. Gedney made notes about a creating a book dummy of the Kentucky work, but no completed dummy exists in the archive. With the exception of one image, the Kentucky photographs were never published during William Gedney's lifetime. From the Duke University web site

Gedney sold the one photo in 1977, apparently for $70.00 since he sent $35.00 to the Cornetts indicating, "I made myself a promise that if I ever sold any of the pictures I took of your family I would split any money with you."

Gedney's photography reveals the poverty in which the Cornetts and their neighours lived, but that was not his primary aim. He was chronicling people of a time and place. Poverty was part of that and most definitely helped to shape their lives, but Gedney's photography did not make it the focus, rather content and structure were.

Mario Sironi (1885 - 1961)

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

---

T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)
From The Hollow Men

Mario Sironi on Wikipedia