Word: bas
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...most visible and palpable form of the Antique was stone. Sculpture afforded the model for painting, and Mantegna took its implications much further. Time and again, his paintings look like renderings of actual stone bas-reliefs, trompe l'oeil records of a scene carved by some imaginary dead hand. The figures and tent of Judith with the Head of Holofernes, circa 1495-1500, are painted with matte gray gouache on fine linen, but they seem at first glimpse to be actual stone. So little in art is new: what Mantegna was doing with this play of illusion...
...sees Seurat's major ambition working itself out: his conservative but in fact deeply radical desire to reconstruct an art opposed to the Impressionist cult of the moment, his hope of making grand, complex, time-resistant images whose mysterious permanence could take its place beside Greek and Assyrian bas- reliefs or the works of Ingres in the Louvre...
...bridges need not be ugly, but with very few exceptions (Detroit's, for instance) they are. At their best, skywalks are bland modernist modules. At their worst, they are like the one that smashes headlong into Minneapolis' quirky turn-of-the-century Egyptian Building, nearly obliterating a carved bas-relief frieze. But aesthetics is not the biggest problem. Skywalks are, in most places most of the time, pseudo-sensible amenities. They are artifacts of an earlier, 1964 World's Fair era, when convenience -- insulation from nature and from the urban hurly-burly -- was the great American goal, neurotically pursued. Skywalks...
Take Donald Trump. Trump, who in 1980 pulled down and smashed a set of art deco bas reliefs from an old Fifth Avenue building ("They were stones with some engravings on them"), says today that "a lot of times preservation is used as an excuse to stop progress" and "as a method of stopping anybody from progressing a city." Trump's current idea of "progressing a city" is to put up a set of nine gigantic high-rise towers, among them the tallest building in the world, on Manhattan's old Upper West Side...
Museum of Fine Arts: Renoir, Filmmaker: Les Bas-Fonds: Friday, 5:30; La Grande Illusion: Friday...