Word: backed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...with being watched. They already see signs that she is trying her wings: she is tired of her Cadillac and wants another; she wants a mink stole; in Paris last winter she went on a clothes-buying spree and overdrew her checking account; in London she snapped back at her teacher, "Wouldn't it be nice if Miss Anderson dropped right through the floor...
...pale green wings, like spreading veils, her head raised heavenwards, her folded arms, crossed upon her breast, are in fact a sort of travesty of a nun in ecstasy." The travesty is complete when the mantis makes her kill: "With the sharpness of a spring, the toothed forearm folds back on the toothed upper arm; and the insect is caught between the blades of the double saw . . . Thereupon, without unloosing the cruel machine, the mantis gnaws her victim by small mouthfuls. Such are the ecstasies, the mystic meditations...
...solid and independent bodies." Three centuries later, Velasquez emphasized "hollow space"-the area between the eye and the thing seen. In recording only a dazzle of colored lights, the impressionists brought painting smack up to the retina. Picasso carried the same process a step further, painting what was back of the eyeball, inside his head. "[In the Picasso school] the eyes, instead of absorbing things, are converted into projectors of private flora and fauna. Before, the real world drained off into them; now, they are reservoirs of irreality...
Among the men who make them convincing is tall, bald Perry Wilson, a 60-year-old ex-architect who joined the museum staff when his business went to pot in 1934. Last week, in a secluded hall just back of the battling moose, Wilson was drawing a pond and trees in charcoal on the curved back of an empty display case. "Half a dozen beavers are going in here," he said. "One of them will have just come out of the water, and one will be gnawing a branch-to bring out the teeth...
...cause before strangers ... It isn't human to expect that in the few brief moments that we shall be before you you can understand our problems. Collective bargaining has been . . . repealed by the President. And if this union strategy works this time, collective bargaining will never come back...