Word: arcadians
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There were three other members of Creedence--Doug Clifford, Stu Cook and John's brother Tom--but it quickly became clear that it was John's band. This caused some resistance among the others. They were chafing against the autocracy of a young man whose Arcadian visions of a mythic America (Green River, Proud Mary) were as ample and unsentimental as his urban cameos (Down on the Corner), his musical allegories (Travelin' Band), his raunchy rockers (Sweet Hitch-Hiker) and his heartsick love songs (Wrote a Song for Everyone...
...Pennsylvania prodigy who became the second president of the Royal Academy) into European careers. Often the homespun Doric is better than the mail-order Ionic. George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was no Poussin, but his groups of flatboatmen and river traders, leaning on crates with the air of Arcadian shepherds on a ruin whilst floating through the delicate silver haze of the Missouri, are often genuinely classical in their construction and repose...
...remains potent. If opera is primarily about singing-sheer, glorious vocalism over all other elements-then these may be parlous times. Where today is a real Aida on the order of Emmy Destinn, an echt Siegfried like Lauritz Melchior or a true Norma such as Rosa Ponselle? In the Arcadian past, there were giants on the earth. How can contemporary opera possibly compete with its starry past...
...most famous example of Manet's contrariness is, of course, the Déjeuner: two women-one completely naked, the other virtually so-and two clothed men, occupying the foreground of a sketchily painted Arcadian landscape. We have been taught to see its allusions stick out like elbows (here a homage to Giorgione, there a quotation from Marcantonio Raimondi), but what infuriated the audience at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, and has caused so many gallons of ink to be spilled on it since, is its insolubility as narrative. An "uncouth riddle," one critic called...
...most Arcadian picture in this show is Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816, almost the last word on Eden-as-Property. The enameled lawns and bulky cows, the relaxed zigzag of planes leading the eye toward the pink villa, the swans and fishermen riding on a serene sheet of water stitched with silver light: this is the epitome of civilized landscape. Like the best work of Jacob van Ruisdael, the 17th century Dutchman whom Constable considered a master of "natural" vision, Wivenhoe Park manages to be both real and ideal; it is a powerful (though subdued) instrument of fantasy as well...