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...cash prize, see how long they can hang from the neck before cutting themselves down. If they wait too long they strangle to death. It is, after all, a bit like bullfighting; and besides, to get the rock lobster contract he must seem simpdtico to the proud Bam-bas-Quincy family, whose wealth dominates the island. Finally, Ben Smith sees what Author Ellin's cluttered symbolism has been thundering about all along: U.S. commerce and Santo Stefano cruelty are all of a piece. The self-control demanded of the self-hanged men-who lose the contest if they begin...
Sterility Banished. "One day," he recalls, "I said to the other four members that maybe we could let it be known that we would look with favor on bidders who offered to spend 1% of construction costs on frescoes, murals, bas-reliefs, mosaics, stained-glass windows, and fountains with statuary in or around them." At the National Conference of Editorial Writers, Von Moschzisker argued his case: "The psychologists and efficiency experts now find that beauty increases productivity. It necessarily follows that true functionalism in man-made edifices must include artistic expression. Sterility and her handmaiden, monotony, must be banished...
...regard to the present-and also with a singular discovery, which is art's power of metamorphosis. However terrible an age, its art transmits only its music. The humanity of dead artists, when it transmits a scourge like the Assyrian horror, for all the torturer-kings of its bas-reliefs, fills our memory with the majesty of the Wounded Lioness. And one of the emotions this creature inspires in us is pity. If an art were to be born from the crematory ovens of our age, it would not express the executioners, it would express the martyrs." Worthy Dreams...
...Sumer: The Dawn of Art (TIME, June 2), is continued with an equally lavish book on Assyria. The grim, skilled art of the warrior peoples who fought in the Mesopotamian valleys-it includes magnificent lion hunts as well as gloomy strings of captives-has never been presented better. Familiar bas-reliefs are well done in black and white, and quite unfamiliar wall paintings are reproduced, for the first time in any book, in excellent color. The moody, beautifully tinted paintings were discovered and copied by a French expedition...
...that outshone anything produced in what was to become Indo-China. The great temple of Angkor Wat, still Cambodia's most admired show place, was their work, but it and the other ruins of Angkor are so dramatic and overwhelming that the individual pieces of sculpture and bas-relief tend to get swallowed up. It is the virtue of the Asia House show that the individual pieces can assert themselves and be evaluated on their...