this is mostly for me i guess but i’d like to keep track of the referenced art in blake butler’s alice knott so here’s a thread:

starting with the cover, which is based on straw flowers and bittersweet by george copeland ault, 1931 (oil on canvas)

woman III by willem de kooning, 1953 (oil on canvas)

alice knot regarding woman III: “it could have been more powerful, more unspeakable; could have worked harder to be nothing other than itself, to exist beyond the confines of its conditions; at the very least it could have been more beautiful. and the same goes for you and me.”

white painting (one panel) by robert rauschenberg, 1951 (oil on canvas)

“it was just a blank white canvas, after all, a work of concept over form, not remarkable unless the 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 was, or perhaps the continuous presence of the possibility of nothing; how the blank was never really blank.”

aleph by ann hamilton, 1992-1993 (color, video, sound. 30 min duration)
http://annhamiltonstudio.com/videosound/aleph_video.html

purple octagonal by richard tuttle, 1967 (dyed canvas)

the end from where you are by jim hodges, 1998 (silk, cotton, polyester, and thread)

an end to contemplation by rené magritte, 1927 (oil on canvas)

the bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even (the large glass) by marcel duchamp, 1915-1923 (oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, dust, two glass panels)

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/dada-and-surrealism/dada2/a/duchamp-the-bride-stripped-bare-by-her-bachelors-even

(oh my god y’all gotta read the website above, this piece is WILD wild)

theee horizontals by louise bourgeois, 1998 (fabric and steel)

red yellow blue white and black by ellsworth kelly, 1953 (seven joined panels, oil on canvas)

no. 2 by yayoi kusama, 1959 (oil and rice blossoms on canvas)

“... comprised solely from a deceptively sallow field of tiny dots, which to alice simulated reptilian skin, and then resembled more and more a shriveled outline of our cosmos as from some god’s eye view the closer in you got” (p. 51)

the nymphaeum by william-adolphe bouguereau, 1878 (oil on canvas)

winter landscape (winterlandschaft) by anselm kiefer, 1970 (watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper)

“... with its pink blood bursting from the neck of a disembodied head floating over a punctured landscape in silent pain” (p. 52)

knead by jenny saville, 1995-96 (oil on canvas)