Word: blockings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...also, in excelsis, a show about connoisseurship, not block- busting. It was scrupulously and intelligently put together by Keith Christiansen, curator of the museum's department of European paintings. His aim, as far as possible, was to concentrate on narrative painting -- stories from the Bible, mainly -- instead of the static images of the Madonna in which Sienese painting abounds. Because these narratives are usually found in the small scenes around compound altarpieces, they have been scattered from Budapest to Melbourne in what museums euphemistically call the "dispersal" -- the dismemberment by thieves and dealers -- of big church paintings...
Because they could be inexpensively reproduced, Japanese wood-block prints, or ukiyo-e, made art available to the masses. Hiroshige: Birds and Flowers (George Braziller; 192 pages; $75) presents 91 surviving color prints from a 19th century master of the form. Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) was enormously successful with subjects more commonly portrayed in wood blocks: landscapes and scenes of urban night life. The prints of birds and flowers collected here harked back to an older Chinese tradition and became popular as well. The formula -- literally an arrangement of birds and plants -- only sounds narrow. Hiroshige's inspired variations...
...Royalton lobby because everybody else there is 44-going-on-22, wearing University of Sofia sweat shirts and $1,250 gazelle-skin bomber jackets. He thinks he would feel less conspicuous sitting down, but that is not nearly so simple as it sounds. Most of the furniture in the block-long lobby, which resembles the grand saloon of a beached ocean liner from some troubled dream, is pretty aggressive stuff. Near at hand, for instance, a pair of sharp, stainless-steel horns, curled forward like those of a fighting bull, rise improbably from the top rear edge of a medium...
...designer's best bold stroke was to hollow out the Royalton's long, block-through, columned lobby and bring it alive. People sit here and talk nonsense to one another, order tea -- a liquor license is still to come -- wait for somebody to tilt a chair back, argue about what Starck did right and wrong. (Right: a bar, made of dark marble, with a lovely, sinuous stainless-steel footrest, and a thin strip of glowing blue glass set into the top. Wrong: tacky purple ropes with tassels, holding up enormous mirrors...
Such praise has been hard won. In the early years, Gray was considered a radical and troublemaker. "I'd go to meetings and get so mad I'd yell and turn the place out," she says. Politicians tried to block her plans, so Gray used a tool no politician can ignore: votes. In 1976 she organized and registered to vote 12,000 public-housing tenants. As chairman of the citywide public-housing board, Gray is now a local political power of the first order. The success at Kenilworth-Parkside hasn't come without struggle. Poverty can % drive out hope...