
The Thinker
Rodin first made this figure as Dante brooding over the Gates of Hell, then enlarged him and set him thinking alone on a rock.

Rodin first made this figure as Dante brooding over the Gates of Hell, then enlarged him and set him thinking alone on a rock.

Three sisters long for Moscow, a family loses its cherry orchard, and everyone talks around what hurts. Chekhov made the unspoken the real action, and modern theater took its shape from him.

At Yalta a married man meets a woman walking a small dog and cannot shake her. Chekhov judges no one and resolves nothing, and the stories come out quietly devastating.

The guitar is the only warm note in the picture. Picasso painted it in his Blue Period, poor himself and living on very little.

In a South American republic of Conrad's invention, silver from a mine props up a dictator, breaks a marriage, and corrupts the man called incorruptible. Conrad's anatomy of capital has not aged.

The title comes from Baudelaire and the technique from Seurat, but the color is already heading somewhere neither of them went.

The laundress bears down on her iron with her shoulders up and her head sunk, all in the cold blue of Picasso's poorest years.
The fate of love is that it always seems too little or too much.