Gallery
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This site begins with pictures by Georges Seurat and Paul Klee, both mentioned in Elizabeth Hayes's research paper, "Wallace Stevens: the Paradox of the Absolute," and continues with other artists that Wallace Stevens admired. When you click each picture, or on the artist's name, you will be linked to Artchive's excellent Web site, which offers information about the artists, analyses of their works, and extensive collections of their paintings. For a more complete idea of Stevens' relationship to the visual art world, check out Sean Socha's research paper, "Imagination/Reality: Wallace Stevens' Harmonium and the Visual Arts" on the American Salons Web Project, as well as Socha's gallery. |
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Seurat utilized the pointillism technique--that is, he formed his compositions with dots of color rather than brushstrokes. Kenneth Burke commented on Seurat's paintings in The Grammar of Motives, suggesting that in them the human form appears to dissolve into the scene, as in this 1988 painting. |
The Seine at Le Grande Jatte, by Georges Seurat
| Wallace Stevens was an admirer of Klee's paintings, and one can note the affinities between Klee's paintings and Steven's poetry: luminous color, playfulness, a sense of reality merging into abstraction, and an eye more interested in emotional and spiritual states than representational accuracy. Klee admired the art of primitives and children. |
The Golden Fish, by Paul Klee
Wassily Kandinsky
| Kandinsky was inspired by music, predominately Wagner, and believed that music is analogous, although superior, to painting. Kandinsky worked to translate music's abstract quality, and its ability to evoke an emotional and imaginative response in the listener, into his paintings. The 1913 painting below serves as a powerful illustration. |
Composition VII, by Wassily Kandinsky
Pablo Picasso
| "Does not the saying of Picasso that a picture is a horde of destructions also say that a poem is a horde of destructions?" asked Stevens in "The Relations between Poetry and Painting." Picasso's painting styles changed constantly over his long career, but this influential 1907 painting exemplifies his Proto-Cubist phase, which he would later develop into Analytic Cubism with Georges Braque, below. In this painting of prostitutes, we can see the ongoing destruction of representationalism that characterized Picasso's development, and the increasing interest in primitive drives and emotions. |
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Pablo Picasso
Georges Braque
| This 1910 painting illustrates Analytic Cubism, a style that Braque and Picasso spearheaded together, and which was influential in Stevens' ideas in his essay, "The Relationships between Painting and Poetry." Stevens quoted Braque: "The senses deform, the mind forms," and noted that Braque "is speaking to poet, painter, musician and sculptor." |
Violin and Candlestick, Georges Braque
