Summer news: Sunset Sunrise

Since the sun is back, let's have a little thought about sunset / sunrise. Think of Grace Jones 2008 Sunset Sunrise: "It's Not Yours (Sunset), It's Not Mine (Sunrise), It's Not Ours (Sunset) to Divide". Or Ingeborg Bachmann in her poem An die Sonne: "Beautiful sun, you rise, never forgetting to go about your task / And finish it, most beautifully in summer, when a day / Evaporates on the shores and mirrors the limp sails / Passing your eye until you tire and reef in the last one."

In art, sunset / sunrise is a problem. It has become such a cliché that you can't paint or photograph it anymore without being kitsch. Same happened with Italy - it's too beautiful. Yet, there are artists who found ways to do so. Take Cy Twombly who wrote the word sunset between brackets in his landscape for The School of Fontainebleau, 1960. This (sunset) left it to the viewer to create the according head-image. 

(sunset) in the left corner of The School of Fontainebleau, 1960

Or Dieter Roth made in 1968 a series of Kleiner Sonnenuntergang and Grosser Sonneruntergang (big and small sunsets) by putting a sausage on pink and blue paper. With the years, the decaying of the sausage causes stains and covers it with fungi, which, however doesn't make the sunset less beautiful.

In 1972 Andy Warhol was commissioned to make a series for the Hotel Marquette in Minneapolis. He serialised the sunset in not less than four hundred seventy-two of prints.