Word: artisticness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...acting so undisciplined that one half-expects to see the milkman, and perhaps his horse, included in the rutting. But Pasolini has other excesses in mind. When the visitor departs, he leaves behind a shrilling choir of victims. The daughter (Anne Wiazemsky) becomes catatonic; the son, an artist, urinates on his paintings; the wife turns nymphomaniac. The maid becomes a martyr who levitates to prove her sanctity, and the father strips to the buff in a Milan railroad station, then flees to the Dolomites bellowing like an enraged bull...
...Wandering Jew named Shimon Susskind, wearing knickers and peddling rosary beads to the tourists at St. Peter's. When Susskind steals Fidelman's briefcase and burns the Giotto manuscript, he forces the ex-painter to reclaim another part of his grubby old identity -the role of impoverished artist...
Sculpture-Hole Grave. Fidelman's predicaments get more desperate, his humiliations more painful. He travels about Italy digging holes in public parks and passing them off to the public as a kind of underground sculpture-reminiscent of the sculpture-by-excavation once committed by another playful artist, Claes Oldenburg, in the soil of New York's Central Park. One outraged member of the public hits Fidelman over the head with his own artistic shovel, and he topples into a sculpture-hole grave. He-and the novel-emerges entirely changed, if not quite resurrected...
...Thus the artist "Fiddleman" (Malamud's pun) is officially pronounced dead. But out of his almost interminable death agonies, Fidelman (a faithful human being) has been born...
...treasured moments of myriad plots. On short count, the following old dependables seem to have resurfaced for the occasion: (a) slightly neurotic actress has stormy relationship with egotistic co-worker, breaks it off and meets nice but slightly square younger man, who proves a shade too comprehensible for her artist's blood, so she goes back to the actor and lives not happily but well; (b) girl gets pregnant, has falling-out with boyfriend when she tries to tell him, goes away in confusion, gets embroiled in family hang-ups, is at last rescued by and reunited with boys...