Word: backgrounding
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Fashioned after Dali's dream of Santiago rising from the sea, the 13½-ft.-high by 10-ft.-wide canvas shows the saint on a rearing horse. The domelike background represents both a scallop shell (one of the symbols of Santiago) and "a whole cathedral surging from the waters." It is strikingly different from the popular Spanish depiction of Santiago as a plumed knight. While the saint waves aloft a figure of Christ instead of a sword, he throws one enormous foot out to the viewer. "It is my foot," says Dali. "I have saintly feet...
...whisky-tippling, well-intentioned weakling who has never successfully crossed the no man's land that separates officers from enlisted men. When Master Sergeant Albert Callan, a World War II hero and an Army regular, is assigned to the company, the captain quickly melts into the background. The men get on the ball, and the sergeant, half hated, half respected, is insistently felt as a ruthless, unbending presence who is long on Army regulations, short on common humanity. Sadly enough for Tom Swanson. the middle-aged sergeant takes a shine to him. He installs him as company clerk, breaks...
...Brooklyn, got an academic training (Cooper Union, National Academy of Design), went on to study with Painter Hans Hofmann, who still cherishes her as "one of the best students I ever had." After she married the tempestuous Pollock, Lee became first of all a wife; she withdrew into the background, managed her husband's affairs, boosted his ego, heralded his triumphs. Hofmann recalls that "she gave in all the time. She was very feminine." The childless Pollocks bought a house in East Hampton, L.I., and he made the barn into his studio. But Lee had her own studio...
...flashbacks, each man defines the life that helped make him what he is-Billings' background affluent, Eastern, Harvard; Haislip's poor, Midwestern, school of hard knocks. But it is Haislip's mistress who finally tells Billings even more than he wants to know: "You're a saver. Cautious and careful . . . Not Hank. He wants things different. He's a breaker, and you know why? He wants to break things and set them up again so he can be a careful little saver instead of you." Whether the breakers or the savers will carry...
...that it had a popular, stimulating and controversial show. Said the museum's director of architecture and design, Arthur Drexler: "Gaudi's preoccupation with organic forms, his enthusiasm for texture, and the alarming Hansel-and-Gretel atmosphere his buildings occasionally produce, are today inevitably seen against the background of psychoanalysis as well as the history of architecture . . . Gaudi is not an architect to be imitated. But once lured into his world, no one is likely to remain indifferent to his innovations in expressive form...