Robert Heinecken’s
Eadweard Muybridge Print
Nude Descending a Staircase

Apolinère Enameled
(Marcel Duchamp)

Picabia Portrait of Apollinaire

In my arrival on earth I found humanity on its last legs, devoted to fetishes, bigoted, barely capable of distinguishing good from evil—and I shall leave it intelligent, enlightened, regenerated, knowing there is neither good nor evil nor God nor devil nor spirit nor matter in distinct separateness.

—The character Dr. Cornelius Hans Peter    from Apollinaire’s novel, Que Faire, 1900

Picabia Portrait of Stieglitz

Man made the machine in his own image. She has limbs which act; lungs which breathe; a heart which beats; a nervous system through which runs electricity. The phonograph is the image of his voice; the camera the image of his eye. The machine is “his daughter born without a mother.”

—Paul Haviland, “291” magazine, 1915

Marcel Duchamp/Fountain
(William Camfield, author)
Cover Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz with Marsden Hartley’s The Warriors as Background

Duchamp saw the artist as a readymade to be moved through the market like a chess piece on a grid.

—David Joselit, The Société      Anonyme: Modernism for America, 2006

The Holy Bible: Old Testament
(David Hammons)
L.H.O.O.Q

Petit Dada (Richard Boix)
Société Anonyme—New York Modern Art Group

Marsden Hartley’s lecture at the April meeting: “Do You Want to Know What a Dada Is?” Mrs. Claire Dana Mumford, a painter, author, and psychologist enlisted by Katherine Dreier to represent the opposition, began by berating the Dadaists. Joseph Stella, the Cubist, was seated in the center of the room with a group of friends and apparently found it difficult to take this seriously. The lady broke off suddenly and said, “I wish that fat man,” indicating Mr. Stella, “would say something. He has been annoying me during my reading by laughing.” Miss Dreier, the president of the Société Anonyme, thinking to pour oil upon troubled waters, arose and said, “Why, I thought this was to be a funny evening,” but Mrs. Mumford, who now appeared to be distinctly ruffled, said, “Well, why cannot somebody explain to me what these dreadful pictures on the wall mean, if they mean anything at all?”

—From a press report on the    Société Anonyme meeting of April 1, 1921

Indestructible Object
(Man Ray)
Eye of Lee Miller

Cut out the eye from the portrait of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well aimed, try to destoy the whole at a single blow.

—Man Ray, This Quarter, September, 1932

Joseph Cornell with One of His Objects
Portrait by Lee Miller

It gives me great pleasure to remember how many detours I had to make, along how many walls I had to grope in the darkness of my ignorance until I found the door which lets in the light of truth.

—Johannes Kepler, as translated by Arthur    Koestler in The Sleepwalkers, one    of Joseph Cornell’s favorite books

Enchanted Wanderer (Joseph Cornell)
Excerpt from a Journey Album for Hedy Lamarr
View Magazine, December, 1941

She will walk only when not bid to, arising from her bed of nothing, her hair of time falling to the shoulder of space. If she speak, and she will only speak if not spoken to, she will have learned her words yesterday and she will forget them to-morrow, if to-morrow come, for it may not.

—Parker Tyler as quoted by Joseph Cornell

Échiquier Surréaliste
(Man Ray)
Surrealist Chessboard

André Breton, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Hans Arp, Yves Tanguy, René Char, René Crevel, Paul Éluard, Giorgio De Chirico, Alberto Giacometti, Tristan Tzara, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Victor Brauner, Benjamin Péret, Gui Rosey, Joan Miró, E.L.T. Mesens, Georges Hugnet, Man Ray

It is above all our differences that unite us.

—André Breton, ca.1920

La Fortune (After Man Ray)
(Sherrie Levine)

The success with which the artist is able to conceal the source of his inspiration is the measure of his originality.

—Man Ray, “Photography Is Not Art,” 1937

A Pipe
(Sherrie Levine)
après René Magritte,“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”

An object encounters its image, an object encounters its name. It happens that the image and the name of this object encounter each other.

—René Magritte: "Word Versus Image,"    Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, 1954

Qu’est-ce que le surréalisme
(André Breton, René Magritte)

“Reality” is the dandelion blown by the woman who appears on the front page of dictionaries.

—André Breton, What Is Surrealism,    translated bye David Gascoyne,    New York, 1974

Untitled (Cubism and Abstract Art by Alfred Barr),
(Steve Wolf)
Oil, lithography ink and modeling paste on paper, mounted on wood and canvasboard

How to Look at Modern Art in America
(Ad Reinhardt)
Cartoon for the New York Tabloid P.M.

The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else...

—Ad Reinhardt, introduction to the    catalog of his 1966 retrospective    at the Jewish Museum, NY

Sketch for Cups 2 Picasso/Cups 4 Picasso
(Jasper Johns)

I remember the first Picasso I ever saw.… I could not believe it was a Picasso. I thought it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen.… I didn’t realize I would have to revise my notions of what painting is.

—Jasper Johns

Transformed (Picasso)
(Nicholas Knight)

Picasso/Woman with Flowered Hat
Matisse/The Artist’s Studio: The Dance
(Richard Pettibone)—Two Roy Lichtensteins

You’ve got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse’s painting more carefully than I, and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he.

—Pablo Picasso as quoted by Pierre    Daix in Picasso: Life and Art, 1993

Cedar Bar
(Red Grooms)

Painting for Kubler
(John Baldessari)

We always may be sure that every man-made thing arises from a problem as a purposeful solution. A work of art, which is a complex of many stages and levels of crisscrossed intentions, is always intrinsically complicated, however simple its effect may seem. We are in the presence of a work of art only when it has no preponderant instrumental use, and when its technical and rational foundations are not pre-eminent.

—George Kubler, The Shape of Time

American Unity Mural
(Diego Rivera)
Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Paulette Goddard

“Paulette Goddard,” Diego said, “stands for American girlhood.”
"Why," curious reporters demanded, "are you and she holding hands?"
“To promote closer Pan-Americanism,” he replied.

Digital-carbon print, 11-1/2" x 11-1/2", 2006
Photographed at the studio of Josh Partridge and
the Imogen Cunningham Trust