Word: 20th
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...that threshold question was no longer vital. Absent a direct threat to American national security, foreign policy in general disappeared from U.S. political discourse. The past three presidential campaigns--1992, 1996 and 2000--may well have been the most devoid of foreign-policy discussion of any during the 20th century. It stood to reason. If the homeland was secure, if there was no deadly adversary stalking us, who cared what was going on out there...
...amiable and gallant, as sociable as you could ask the winner of every literary prize short of the Nobel to be. If this is all just a mellow charade, it's certainly one that he has mastered, just as in this brief novel of deep feeling, his 20th, he has mastered the voice of a woman struggling to convey the things that inspired her. "This is my most 'de-masculinized' work," he says. "The willingness to relive a life--I can only imagine two women doing it. A guy would get impatient and leave...
Even if we admit that the 20th century was not a great era for religious art, that doesn't mean it was not an age of faith among American artists. For most of his career, Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) was in the grip of two consuming devotions--the cult of modernism and the religion of the Industrial Age. It was his great intuition to bring the two together in paintings and photographs of what you might call exalted exactitude. Sheeler called it Precisionism. It was a taut, hard-edged and sanitary style that bound art and industry into hymns...
...surrounding countryside. In a photograph like Doylestown House, Stairs from Below, in which the underside of a cellar stairway forms a hard-edged, spiraling abstraction, he was drawing connections between the most radical modernism and old traditions of American art and life. What his picture hints is that the 20th century had a backstairs connection to the 19th. Sheeler suspected, and he was right, that a Pennsylvania farmhouse drew upon the same instinct for clarity and simplicity as a Cezanne, that modernism was not a break with the past but an excavation of its underlying structures...
...lines and smokestacks--as a place as beautiful as any farm country. It was a materialist faith with a long American pedigree, one that had found its way into the plainspoken art of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins in the 19th century. Its essence was summed up for the 20th in the dictum of the poet William Carlos Williams, who was an acquaintance of Sheeler's and once sat for his camera: "No ideas but in things...