The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse)

Two subjects colliding in one title

The main title names a race track. The parenthesis names a rider on a pale horse. Those are the two extremes of this register in a single line: the horse as competitive property, priced and run for money, and the horse as the mount of an apocalyptic figure. The pale horse and its rider are a fixed and public piece of iconography, stable for centuries, in which the animal is not transport but an announcement. Putting that figure on a race course sets the commercial function of the animal against the emblematic one and makes the reader decide which title is the real one.

What the record holds

The date of creation is 1900 and the location is the Cleveland Museum of Art. No dimensions are recorded; the field is empty. Symbolism is the style term and American the nationality attached to the painter. The record files the work under landscape and rural headings, under Animal Art > Horse and under a fantasy heading, and the measured colour families of the image are brown and yellow.

What the parenthesis is and is not

An alternative title in a catalogue is a record of how a work has been called, not a statement of what the painter intended. This entry reads it as evidence about the subject's reception and stops there.