Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Near Eastern sects had the opposite view: it believed that the Creator and his work were evil, and that men's souls were imprisoned by earthly life. The only escape was salvation through possession of an esoteric gnosis (Greek for knowledge), which led to union with an abstract supreme being. Such was the creed of Gnosticism, a strange amalgam of beliefs that was orthodox Christianity's main rival in the early centuries after Christ...
...true God, the Gnostics reasoned, could not have created anything so despicable as the material world. Another supreme being emerges in Gnostic tracts: an abstract figure who embodies absolute truth and light and rules an invisible, heavenly realm. The lowest being in this realm is a woman, Sophia (Greek for wisdom), who offends the supreme being by producing a child without a mate; her offspring, a malevolent false god named Yaldabaoth, created the material world. He is thus an evil parody of the Old Testament creator revered by Jews and Christians...
...ordinary American is characteristically generous. It is the enlightened, educated American who is more apt to be swayed by abstract ideological considerations: by feelings of disgust toward the war itself, joy in the triumph of the North Vietnamese, and the acceptance of stereotypes about South Vietnamese as the "bad guys," viewed self-righteously as a group rather than as individuals in need...
Died. Dame Barbara Hepworth, 72, British abstract sculptor; in a fire that ravaged her studio at St. Ives, Cornwall. A fellow traveler with the small band of venturesome Britons-including Sculptor Henry Moore and her second husband, Painter Ben Nicholson-who pioneered abstract art in the 1930s, Hepworth established her trademark in 1931 when she pierced a hole in a small carving to seize the viewer's eye. "I thought it was a small miracle," she later recalled. "A new vision was opened." Holes and hollows, sometimes painted to accentuate their depth, turned up in most...
...easily stray to the center of the sunken atrium, half expecting to see a sarcophagus. Roche-Dinkeloo's design is elegant, icy and inflated. Lehman agreed that the new wing should have almost the same proportions as the Met's Great Hall - thus ensuring a large abstract monument to himself - but he also wanted to commemorate his way of life with the period rooms. Unfortunately, these seven gloomily sumptuous chambers are of little historical interest (they were done in 1959 by a Paris decorator, in a plum-cake version of stockbroker's plush). Lehman's paintings...