Word: 18th
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...Mastery & Elegance exhibit at the Sackler Museum consists of 115 drawings by 70 different French artists from the collection of private investor Jeffrey E. Horvitz. The "Guide to the Exhibition" booklet tells the story of the 17th and 18th centuries of French drafts-manship. It outlines the development of the techniques, approaches and influences of these French artists in cultured and enlightened words, but it may be inconsequential to anyone who isn't an art history concentrator...
...fitting testament to the perils of ballooning that this 18th-century technology has never been successfully employed to circumnavigate the globe. But where technical difficulties, bad weather and worse luck have taken their toll in the past, the dark clouds of politics are threatening now as Richard Branson, Steve Fossett and Per Lindstrand approach northern Chinese airspace -- which Chinese authorities insist is off limits...
These, like the doings of sumo wrestlers and high-class prostitutes, gave a rich subject matter to 18th century graphic artists like Suzuki Harunobu, Kitagawa Utamaro and the theater caricaturist Toshusai Sharaku, whose image of the actor Otani Oniji III playing a samurai's manservant, all red-rimmed eyes and stylish snarl, is a deliciously succinct expression of fictive bloody-mindedness. Through the medium of prints, the range of things that could be depicted widened to take in all Japan. Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and Ando Hiroshige's Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido...
...assured market still life (Jakuchu was, in fact, a vegetable wholesaler before he turned to painting full time). Gourds, melons, turnips, ears of corn and a shiitake mushroom surround an enormous forked white radish, lying as if in state on a basket. But as Singer points out, an educated 18th century Japanese would have recognized this as a parody of a familiar religious image--the parinirvana, or scene of the dead Buddha encircled by a crowd of his mourning disciples. You only need to try to imagine a Western equivalent to this--a deposition from the cross, say, with Christ...
Then we are off again, to fly farther south and east to the Maroon Saramaccan village of Asindopo in the region of the Upper Suriname River. Asindopo means "sit down and hope"--a welcome thought to its original settlers, runaway slaves from Dutch plantations in the 18th century. We go by corjal to visit their descendants. Some are swimming; some are washing clothes in the river; some are staring at us. The faces of the children are a cross between innocence and gravity. On a far bank, a glorious ceiba rises to the sky. It is called the "house...