Word: artful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...plus diplomats and clergy, who will join in a 90-minute round of prayer and testimonials at a Washington hotel. (At one such session in the Reagan era, former Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin surprised fellow guests by joining them in a hearty rendition of the hymn How Great Thou Art...
...last few decades of his life produced little but kitsch. The perfunctory replays of images from his inventive youth -- the burning giraffes, androgynous St. Johns of the Cross and nudes with chewing-gum hips -- were printed in tens of thousands of "rare" or limited works; this was art sleaze, surrealism pathetically embracing the ethos of the Franklin Mint. Dali's last years, surrounded by flacks and barracuda (from whom he was, to put it mildly, not protected by his wife Gala, who died in 1982), were a cautionary horror. Several years ago, when his hands had long been too shaky...
...1920s and '30s. Like his fellow Catalan Joan Miro, Dali was deep-dyed with images of place, among them the contorted rocks and flat beaches of the coast near the town of Figueras, where he grew up, and the flowing, bizarre buildings of Barcelona's master of art nouveau, Antonio Gaudi...
...From his art-student days (if one is to believe The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, his charmingly mythomanic autobiography), he struck everyone, especially himself, as a prodigy. Around 1929, after moving to Paris and serving an apprenticeship in various realist and cubist styles, he saw that realism, when pressed to a photographic extreme, could subvert one's sense of reality. He therefore used what he called "tricks of eye fooling" to invoke "sublime hierarchies of thought...
Even in his most extreme moments of anticlerical shock, Dali remained a Spanish Catholic. He inherited from Spanish devotional art a paralyzing morbidity about flesh. He liked anything that was not erect: running Camembert, soft watches, sagging loaves of flesh held up by crutches. Naturally all this was much more shocking 50 years ago than it is today: Dali was regularly denounced by Fascists and Stalinists alike as a decadent threat to youth. When he could no longer annoy either the bourgeoisie or the self- appointed guardians of the proletariat, he mortally offended the avant- garde by embracing Franco...