| Title | Creator |
Date |
Era | City | Country | Emotional Sum (Sense of Life or emotional World View) | Theme | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cyrano de Bergerac | Playwright: Edmond Rostand | 1897 | 1900s | France |
Life can be exciting. Life can be grand, literally. There is also some great sadness about consummated love, since it is portrayed as unreachable. |
The importance of independence and independent thought. Compromise is deadly to one's soul. Sub-themes: a) Doubt of one's goodness because of an incidental fact (physical feature) is terribly damaging and tragic. b) Helping someone by faking reality is damaging and can come to no good. |
||
| Trees | Alexander, John: | 1899 | 1900s | Olathe | United States |
A sense of the world as dynamic and strong. |
Nature is wild and dynamic. |
|
| Merry Widow (Die Lustige Witwe) | Composer: Franz Lehar | 1905 | 1900s | Vienna | Austria |
Love brings gaiety and joy to life. |
Love can be gay and tender, solemn and lighthearted, painful and joyous. |
|
| Brass Bowl, The | Vance, Louis Joseph: | 1907 | 1900 - 1950 | United States |
The world is a delightful place. Good things happen to the deserving. |
Life as a gay, lighthearted adventure. |
||
| National Farmers' Bank | Architect: Louis Sullivan | 1907 | 1900 - 1950 | Owatonna MN | United States |
Being able to breath freely -- expansively, and feeling that there are no limits to what man can do. |
The world is expansively, infinitely rich. |
|
| King in Khaki, A | Author: Henry Kitchell Webster | 1909 | 1900 - 1950 | United States |
Honesty is a noble and practical way of life. |
Business acumen produces both material wealth and moral right. The success of the entrepreneur in this story, along with his relation to all his staff and secondary and tertiary folks on the island who work for him -- makes him into a "king" based on important human relations and the rightness of his decisions that result in a successful business enterprise. A subsidiary theme might be termed the power of morality over physical power or economic "power". |
||
| La Gomena (Towing a Boat) | Painter: Ettore Tito | 1909 | 1900s | Italy |
There is great effort in life, and a woman can be the master of it. This painting is a curious combination of romantic heroism and 19th century genre naturalism. It has a visual dynamism and dramatic content that is strongly romantic, yet the subject is the prosaic task of pulling a boat out of the water. |
The will and the power of a woman. Implacable determination. |
||
| Robie House | Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright | 1910 | 1900 - 1950 | Chicago, Illinois | United States |
The world is open and has sweeping, unending possibilities. |
The essence of a house as shelter, and providing a sense of strength and privacy. That is, a structure that exudes strength through its massive cantilever and massive brick and stone forms, along with its big overhangs sheltering the windows to create a sense of privacy and enclosure, in its urban situation. |
|
| Hyacinths to feed thy soul | White, James Terry: | 1911c | 1900s | United States |
Hopeful. Even in poverty one can have beauty. |
Beauty is a form of sustenance |
||
| Real Adventure, The | Author: Henry Kitchell Webster | 1915 | United States |
Life is wonderful as long as you realize that life has to be earned the hard way. |
Creating your self is the only way to live. |
|||
| Of Human Bondage | Maugham, W. Somerset: | 1915 | 1900 - 1950 | United Kingdom |
Life is a fearful gray spread of actions and in-actions without genuine values. We are all deformed in mind or spirit and should accept convention as demanded by those around us. |
Man's life is outside his control. Conventionality is the final ideal. |
||
| The Samovar | Painter: Emil Carlsen | 1920c. | 1900s |
The world is full of textural richness worth looking at. |
The richness of light and the objects it caresses. This is a paean to the richness of visual experience, but with the simplest of materials -- just a light source and two kinds of simple unadorned objects. |
|||
| Composition with Red Yellow Blue and Black | Painter: Piet Mondrian | 1921 | The Hague | Netherlands |
[Seems mute] |
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| Blue Phoenix | Painter: Koyo Omura | 1921 | 1900s | Chicago | United States |
A pleasing and lush, possibly claustrophobic, world. |
||
| System of Architectural Ornament, A | Designer: Louis Henri Sullivan | 1922 | 1900s | Chicago | United States |
The world is a place of infinite, ordered, geometric, fluid possibilities. |
||
| Are You Lonesome Tonight? | Composer: Lou Handman | 1926 | 1900s |
Sensuality and bitterness |
The remembrance of past love. |
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| Crane Under the Rain | Ohara, Shoson: | 1928 | 1900s | Japan |
Life is difficult. |
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| I'll See You Again | Composer: Noel Coward | 1929 | 1900s | Manchester | United Kingdom |
Life is bittersweet |
Sweet memories of love last forever |
|
| Covered Box | Designer: John Otar | 1930 | 1901-2000 | Santa Cruz, CA | United States |
Fun; complexity made from simplicity |
||
| Chocolate Pitcher and Butter Dish | Villeroy & Boch: | 1930 | Germany |
Friendly warmth (arising from the simple graceful lines, and the unadorned simplicity of the colors without ornament) |
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| Day at the Beach | Painter: J.C. Leyendecker | 1932 | 1900s | United States |
Fun and cuteness. |
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| Design for Living | Writer: Noel Coward | 1932 | 1900s | United Kingdom |
Life can be giddy and bright. Facing up to one's anti-conventional values is important. Conventional morality must be questioned if it causes suffering and conflict. |
You should follow your deepest values and accept them no matter how unconventional the outcome. A rare combination of the wittiest, lightest of Noel Coward's style, along with deeper themes of romantic love, proper morality and how should one live. |
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| Boulevard of Broken Dreams | Composer: Warren and Dubin | 1933-34 | 1900s | United States |
Weariness & Sadness |
Life is loss of dreams and sadness |
||
| Ruggles of Red Gap | Director: Leo McCarey | 1935 | 1931-1950 | United States |
Happiness and fulfillment is in yourself. |
Personal declaration of independence from servitude |
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| Rembrandt | Director: Korda Alexander | 1936 | 1931-1950 | United Kingdom |
Life is hard as an independent spirit, and wealth will elude you, but you will be happy, after a fashion. |
