Word: 1880s
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Influenced by the supple lines and Asian touches of the art nouveau movement, he did better with fabric and furniture. As an interior decorator, he brought exotic warmth to the drafty drawing rooms of Vanderbilts and Mellons. He added Moorish spice to Mark Twain's study, and in the 1880s swathed the public rooms of the Chester A. Arthur White House with such exuberance that one critic compared the ambiance to "steamboats and barrooms." (Theodore Roosevelt later restored colonial austerity...
Such a reaction against impressionism was strong among younger painters of the 1880s. They were led by Georges Seurat, whose Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-86, is a manifesto of anti-impressionist aims: a hieratic, pseudoscientific, heavily theorized paean to timelessness, edged with mordant social irony about the mechanization of bourgeois life. For some it made sensuous pleasure look like an insufficient message for art. Impressionism was gaining no new adherents and losing some of its original ones: Sisley had run out of steam by the '80s, and Pissarro had gone over to the younger...
Ever since Chicago declared a ten-story building the world's first "skyscraper" in the 1880s, local developers have competed to see how high they could go. Since 1974, the Sears Tower (on the left in the model) has * ranked as the world's tallest building at 1,454 ft., but that title is about to be challenged by a planned $500 million tower only three blocks away from the current champ. Code-named Skyneedle, the 125-story building would soar to a height of nearly 2,000 ft. Rivals have criticized the proposal by developers Lee Miglin and Paul...