Word: bas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Possessed by Vengeance. Author White invests each episode with the bladed tension of a poised samurai sword. Though the Japanese never appear, they lurk menacingly just behind the last hill. The major's men achieve grace or disgrace under pressure, but, unfortunately, they are etched in bas-relief-nearly flat characters caught in symbolic or merely arbitrary poses. The book is even shallower when it tries to be most profound, e.g., in suggesting that the major is the compulsive victim of his self-corrupting power when he goes on an irresponsible shooting spree to avenge the killing...
...Faced Beasts. To bring her thesis into focus, Dorothy Norman assembled photographs of more than 100 art objects -the Assyrian Gilgamesh strangling a lion in an 8th century B.C. bas-relief, an Egyptian sculpture of the god Horus with lion-hunting gear, Heracles struggling barehanded with the Nemean Lion, as shown on a 5th century B.C. Greek vase, the herdsman subduing the ox in the Zen Buddhist Ox-Herding Pictures, a Russian icon showing St. George and the dragon. Oldest examples of her theme are drawings from the Lascaux Cave in France, done more than 30,000 years...
Waco never quite forgot its prairie Voltaire. The grass had hardly begun to cover his grave when a figure stole into Oakwood Cemetery and fired a gun point-blank at Brann's bas-relief profile on the stone. Like his contemporaries, those who followed could never agree whether he was saint or devil's apostle, infidel or genius. But, as Waco was reminded last week after almost 60 years, the words outdistanced the bullets...
...While amusing his children building sand castles on the beach at East Hampton, he conceived the idea of sculpting in damp sand and casting directly in concrete. A certain amount of sand sticks to Nivola's concrete casts, providing color and texture plus an odd feeling that the bas-relief, once erected, may slide away like sand at any moment...
...avoid "the invasions of the birds," Nivola keeps his bas-reliefs fairly flat, but the play of sunlight and shadow over their pocked, planed, humped and dovetailed surfaces gives an illusion of depth, elaborate richness and almost of motion. Their apparent coolness is partly compensated by an underlying Sardinian warmth. Sculptor Nivola's most abstract conceptions are based on careful sketches of his wife, his children and their dog; they hint, vaguely but happily, at life in the flesh...