Word: 1880s
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...Shone writes in the catalog, Sickert's career ran parallel to all the great Modernist movements from the 1880s to the 1930s but belonged to none of them. He was "a passionately self-isolating figure . . . highly individual, combining expected elements of the European mainstream with personal tastes that can appear willful or mandatory." He was also a witty and truthful art critic, whose essays and journalism, collected in 1947 by Osbert Sitwell under the title A Free House!, are never dull and often possess a Shavian energy. Courageous to the point of eccentricity, Sickert always followed his own nose...
...remember that Sickert was slightly older than most of these painters. He was born in 1860; they hardly influenced him at all. The men who did were pre- rather than Postimpressionist: Whistler, Manet and, above all, Degas. Sickert had worked for Whistler as a studio assistant in the early 1880s, and Whistler gave him a letter of introduction to Degas. A strong friendship grew up between...
...some historians think, contributed to the fall of ancient Greece. Europeans of medieval times were tormented by the insect Chaucer knew as the midge; the English word mosquito, from the Spanish for "little fly," appeared in the 16th century, along with new and nastier New World species. In the 1880s the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, fresh from the triumph of building the Suez Canal, was utterly vanquished in his heroic effort to dig a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, partly because thousands of the Europeans he brought with him fell victim to mosquito-borne disease...
...space, not bounded by rigid lines, that undulates, flares, inflates, twists and contains stunning metaphors and moments of theater. The basement of the palace he built off the Ramblas for his main patron, Eusebi Guell, could serve as a set for The Ring -- not surprisingly, since Catalans in the 1880s were crazy for Wagner, the newest of new composers. Gaudi's Casa Mila, on Passeig de Gracia, known to Barcelonans as La Pedrera -- the Stone Quarry -- was intended to suggest a seaworn cliff, and its iron balconies fringe it like kelp...
...early paintings, of the 1870s, are stiff, naive and curiously old- fashioned; they are almost exactly like the work that Raphaelle Peale, America's first still-life artist, had been doing around 1815. But Harnett hit his stride in the 1880s, and in fact the most beautiful painting in this show, The Artist's Letter Rack, dates from 1879: an image of letters, visiting cards and a theater ticket, the meager index of an artist's social life, held by a crisscrossed square of pink tape to an unvarnished pine board. Everything is actual size, and the flatness...