Protractor

1

Vintage Automobile Ads & Posters, 

ed. Carol Belanger Grafton. Image 056.

Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.

Click to enlarge.

In its forest, the limousine is an unmoving primeval whiteness. Adam and Eve have been here all along in the background, and there is no road for the machine to have arrived on. The only motion in this world comes from quick nervous hatchings of black and dark green laid down on the canvas as if God were Paul Cézanne. If Adam and Eve ever step into the Voisin's white cabin, they will blush and change and begin speaking. They will have become a dictionary containing only the word "connoisseur." If you have the godlike power to have purchased me, says the Voisin to us who stare from outside the forest, you don't just recognize Cézanne's oeuvre; you are a part of Cézanne's oeuvre. If you can purchase me, you are a museum and a scripture.

2

Jacques Henri Lartigue, Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, 1911.

Great Photographs from Daguerre to the Great Depression,

image 106. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2008

The woman is a tilted cylinder bustling through space and transmuting it to time. She is the force that tilts the plane across which her dogs and somebody's car and somebody else's carriage go sliding as if gravity had been pulled out from under them. Floating her upward until she bumps into the top of the image frame, it's her hat that makes the magic. For fun, she borrowed it from Hermes.