Posts Tagged ‘Harvard’

The Fire of Hephaistos

Wednesday, May 1st, 1996

These ancient bronzes, which have long since lost their gold­en gleam, are still numi­nous frag­ments of a van­ished world. One stat­ue of young man was recent­ly pulled out of a riv­er; his pale sea-green body is scratched and scarred; but he is still a love­ly appari­tion, remind­ing me of some lines from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”:
“Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suf­fer a sea change
Into some­thing rich and strange.”

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Busch-Reisinger Museum

Saturday, September 14th, 1991

A crowd­ed stage, and all the play­ers on it. A king, wear­ing a crown, stabs him­self in the heart. A woman looks at her reflec­tion in a mir­ror, next to a stat­ue of a Greek god. Mod­ern men and women read the news­pa­per, talk, flirt, and fight with real knives. MAX BECK­MAN­N’s The Actors aims to encom­pass all of Art and Life in thick, sure slash­es of paint.

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Fragments of Antiquity

Friday, June 21st, 1991

All that we know of Greece has come to us in ruins–armless, head­less, fad­ed, fall­en, bro­ken, bat­tered, lost in trans­la­tion. What we have are frag­ments, frag­ments that have lost almost everything–except their poet­ry. But, gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion, that poet­ry has nev­er lost its thrilling, vision­ary gleam.

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Images of the Mind

Monday, May 19th, 1986

Tao Chi was a prince who became a wan­der­ing Bud­dhist monk. His “Melan­choly Thoughts on the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers,” cap­tures the mood of the end of autumn. A lone­ly fish­ing hut is half-hid­den by a few sparse trees; a flock of wild geese flies over a riv­er. The cal­lig­ra­phy echoes the flight of the birds and the quiver of the leaves. With­out under­stand­ing a word, we can feel the poetry.

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The Sketchbooks of Le Corbusier

Tuesday, December 1st, 1981

LE CORBUSIER cre­at­ed his own myth through the organ­ic gen­er­a­tion of forms. His genius con­stant­ly renewed itself, pulling new phe­nom­e­na into the orbit of his thought and recre­at­ing them in the puri­fied, mon­u­men­tal yet human forms of his architecture.

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Ingres 1780–1980

Monday, December 1st, 1980

For a twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry audi­ence brought up on abstrac­tion, INGRES’s great­ness, his fas­ci­na­tion, lies in the abstract qual­i­ties of his line, its rest­less, obses­sive move­ment across the page. Ingres’ line has pow­er, grace, life; it’s bril­liant, dra­mat­ic, neu­rot­ic, even per­verse. He told his stu­dents, “Draw­ing is every­thing; it is all of Art.” 

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Gabriele Munter: From Munich to Murnau

Saturday, November 1st, 1980

A woman sits think­ing, rest­ing her head on her hand in a room filled with flow­ers and fruit. The room seems charged with mean­ing, filled with her extra­or­di­nary pres­ence. For GABRIELE MUNTER, art was not about appear­ances, but about real­i­ties lying behind appear­ances. Abstrac­tion was a way of see­ing into the heart of things.

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Claude Le Lorrain

Tuesday, April 1st, 1980

CLAUDE LE LORRAIN depicts the moment just before trans­fig­u­ra­tion — the moment just before women turn into god­dess­es, or girls turn into swans, or life turns into art. His light is dusk and twi­light — the dark­ling light that wash­es the phys­i­cal world in unearth­ly beau­ty and fills the heart with an intox­i­cat­ing sense of possibility.

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Becoming an Art Critic

Thursday, April 13th, 1978

In 1979, an 11th cen­tu­ry Per­sian poem with 50,000 rhyming cou­plets, illu­mi­nat­ed by tiny paint­ings in exquis­ite col­ors made from crushed jew­els and insect­s’ wings, inspired my first sto­ry about art. For the next 20 years, I wrote, pub­lished, and broad­cast hun­dreds of Sto­ries about Art in Boston and beyond. This is how it all began. 

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