Word: best
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Dwight Eisenhower and Harold Macmillan met at Aspen Cottage's hearthside with a common goal: to maintain peace even while preserving freedom. But they differed significantly in their ideas about the best road to travel toward that goal...
...major value of the book--to this Montrealer, at least-seems to lie in MacLennan's incredible sympathy for his characters and their city. If in advanced middle age they now appear flabby and indifferent as they quietly sip Dewar's Best-Ever-Bottled, they exist, at least. MacLennan has explained how hard knocks made them the way are. Hard knocks always arouse sympathy, particularly if the victims are people you know...
...turned from the nice distinctions of tone and shade in eighteenth and nineteenth century Japanese prints. This very simple style, more Western than Oriental, mainly produces naive results; the childish, pseudo-folk art atmosphere of Stones in Water and Hawk Woman is most disturbing. However, the best color print, Nirvana, is so excellent that one is sorely tempted to modify one's attack on Munakata's color schemes. Here, in this haunting, mystical picture, color plays a positive and entirely thought-out psychological role...
Munakata's themes derive from conventional Japanese subjects-religious figures, folk tales and landscapes. Certainly the most impressive are the big prints of four of the Buddha's disciples. Here, Munakata's simple and strident forms recall Indian and Japanese Buddhist paintings, while suggesting the forcefulness of the best of the German Expressionists. Though the prints may lack the mystical introspection of earlier Oriental religious works, their clarity and technical control show how adept and proficient a master Munakata...
Still, it is in his desire to reassert in individual terms vitality of the tradition that has underlaid Japan's artistic achievements in the past that Munakata experiments so extensively with Occidental styles. In this devilishly difficult task, he has succeeded; his art, at its best, is entirely personal and modern, yet also perfectly Japanese...