Paintings

Frans Hals - Two Paintings ("Regentesses of the Old Men's Alms House" and "Regents of the Old Men's Alms House") - c. 1664

“Hans, an old man of over eight, was destitute. Most of his life he had been in debt. During the winter of 1664, the year he began painting these pictures, he obtained three loads of peat on public charity, otherwise he would have frozen to death. Those who now sat for him were the administrators of such public charity… In this confrontation of the Regents and Regentesses stare at Hals, a destitute old painter who has lost his reputation and lives off public charity; he examines them through the eyes of a pauper who must nevertheless try to be objective, i.e., must try to surmount the way he sees as a pauper. This is the drama of these paintings.”
- John Berger, from Ways of Seeing

John Berger, from "Ways of Seeing"

“If we accept that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen.
The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue.
And often dialogue is an attempt to verbalize this—an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see things’, and an attempt to discover how ‘he sees things.’”

Rene Magritte - “The Interpretation of Dreams” - 1935

Agnolo Bronzino - “Venus, Cupid, Time, and Love” - 1545

Johannes Vermeer - “Maid with Milk Jug” - 1657

Dan Flavin - "(quietly, to the memory of Mia Visser)", 1977

“Titles play an important part: by the mention of the name of a person to whom the work is dedicated after the neutral Untitled, that work acquires an individual note and meaning. Sometimes this is private, but it can also related to a well-known person. The title The Nominal Three (to William of Ockham) of 1963 is of particular significance. Ockham (d. 1349), an excommunicated Franciscan, made a distinction between faith and knowledge and held that reality consists only of individual things, an important idea to Flavin.”

- From the Kroller-Muller Museum Catalogue