Word: 18th
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...them, its rocky coast and tangled woods were--in the expressive phrase used by one of them--"the Lord's waste," an unowned biblical desert full of strange beasts and savage half-men. However, although America produced no significant landscape painting or religious art during the 17th or 18th century, by the mid-19th century, landscape was the national religious symbol...
...furnish the presidential mansion, "to fix the taste of our country properly...everything about you should be substantially good and majestically plain, made to endure." Modern Americans are taught to love luxury, to think of it as a reward for success. Those of the late 18th century were more apt to distrust it as a vice. They associated it with frivolity, decadence--colonial rule. Virtue showed itself in plainness, explicitness, pragmatism, "making do," an unfussed directness of craftsmanship. There was, as the phrase went, an "American grain...
...arts in America did not bring forth anything much new at first, except for mid- to late-18th century furniture--and one work by Benjamin West. When he was 12, West (1738-1820) announced that his talent would make him the "companion of kings and emperors." And as a matter of fact, it did: after he settled in England in 1763, he became George III's favorite artist. His definitive work was The Death of General Wolfe, 1770. It was a history painting but recent history, recounting a British victory over the French at the Battle of Quebec only...
POTSDAM, Germany: German police have discovered what is believed to be a legendary Russian mosaic in the basement of a German truck driver?s apartment. The art was part of an ornate 1,300-square-foot hall with walls made of amber in Peter the Great's 18th Century palace. It vanished during World War II, sometime after Nazi troops took it from St. Petersburg to Konigsburg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). While the German government claimed the wall panels were destroyed during the1945 Soviet invasion of Konigsburg, Russian officials charged that Bonn had hidden the treasure. While the fate...
...decade, arrogantly convinced that Jonathan Swift's 18th century political satire Gulliver's Travels was just waiting to be made into a mini-series starring Ted Danson, Halmi tirelessly pitched the idea to skeptical network executives until NBC succumbed two years ago. Improbably enough, Gulliver drew critical raves and wound up as last season's highest-rated mini-series. Motivated by that triumph, Halmi, whose curriculum vitae is not entirely without a smattering of titles like Ivana Trump's For Love Alone, has now made it a mission to devote himself almost exclusively to reinterpreting the classics for television...