Word: ant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...contribution to world art is the violently expressionistic wooden sculpture and highly stylized masks of tribal art-the art that impressed and excited Picasso and Matisse and strongly deflected the course of modern art. Oddly enough, this tribal art owes much of its vitality to the wood-eating white ant of Africa. Because of its depredations-and some help from natural decay-each generation of carvers had to create new images and new variations on traditional forms, constantly revitalizing an image that was lodged in the tribe's consciousness...
Times and critical tenets are changing, though. Aesop's ant is no longer quite so honored, his grasshopper no longer quite so despised. Play has ceased to be such a dirty word. The wise and serious artist is more and more free of the burden of having to sound like a high priest. Today's readers should be more inclined to accept Auden's virtuosity without imputing shallowness. He is serious, if not deadly-and who, save Lowell perhaps, can match him for compassion and complexity...