
The Rite of Spring
Noise from the 1913 premiere audience drowned out the orchestra, so Nijinsky stood in the wings shouting the counts at his dancers.

Noise from the 1913 premiere audience drowned out the orchestra, so Nijinsky stood in the wings shouting the counts at his dancers.

Kandinsky made more than thirty studies for this and then painted the four-meter canvas in three days, apocalypse dissolved past recognition.

Black skeins and floating patches of color with nothing recognizable in it at all. Kandinsky thought painting could work on you like music.

Alexandra Bergson inherits her father's failing Nebraska claim and mortgages it to buy more land while the neighbors give up and leave. Cather made the American prairie a landscape fit for epic.

A curve of the guitar, some stenciled letters, and otherwise a lattice of brown and grey. Braque and Picasso developed this together, canvas by canvas.

A train crosses the sky upside down, a man drifts past on a parachute, and the cat on the sill has a human face.

Sleeping women tangled into a whirlpool of pattern and flowers, one of them at the center just about to wake up.

The deer have almost dissolved into the crystalline planes of the wood, which is exactly what Marc was after.

Foxes curled together and assembled out of shards of grey, blue and rust. Marc was killed at Verdun three years after painting it.

Beckmann painted the disaster a year after it happened, borrowing Géricault's raft, and it now reads as a rehearsal for the war.