Word: balzac
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...human torso. The "mutilated Eden" of Poland's forest turns into a metaphor of human loss and survival. In the Marlborough show are four bronzes, each 10 ft. to 12 ft. high, called Hand-Like Trees, whose vertical trunks do resemble arms: their looming profiles recall Rodin's standing Balzac, and their vigorous modeling around a split core provokes a distant memory of Matisse's bronze Backs...
...force -- Delacroix's Massacre at Chios has a long resonance in Daumier's work -- Daumier didn't share his love of the exotic. For Daumier, everything worth drawing happened right under his nose, in the railway carriage, the estaminet, the cellar, the butcher's shop or the lawcourts. Like Balzac or Dickens, Daumier worked out of immersion in the muck and detail of life as it was lived...
...browsing in high and popular culture. The Glass Key comes from Dashiell Hammett, and references to the Fantomas thrillers (on which Magritte, along with the rest of the Surrealists and everyone else in France and Belgium, doted) are everywhere. On the other hand, The Man from the Sea is Balzac's title, and The Elective Affinities Goethe...
Anarchists like Felix Feneon praised his work for its social insight, and a journalist in 1893 credited him with creating "the epic of the lower classes" -- a visual equivalent, as it were, to Zola, Balzac and other literary realists whose project was to record the "real" France, top to bottom. But there is no echo whatever, in Lautrec's paintings or in his recorded remarks, of the political ferment that pervaded the intellectual and street life of Paris in the 1890s. And in terms of sexual politics, the seedy, overheated rooms of Lautrec's brothels are not much different from...
Therefore, goodbye, Columbus? Balzac once suggested that all great fortunes are founded on a crime. So too all great civilizations. The European conquest of the Americas, like the conquest of other civilizations, was indeed accompanied by great cruelty. But that is to say nothing more than that the European conquest of America was, in this way, much like the rise of Islam, the Norman conquest of Britain and the widespread American Indian tradition of raiding, depopulating and appropriating neighboring lands...