Word: bombastical
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...manifesto that appeared in Mexico City in 1961 seemed like the usual bombast from angry young painters out to attract as much attention as they could. In big blue capital letters, it blasted just about everything sacred to the Mexican art world. Damned as academismo were slavish and parochial imitations of Diego Rivera's once-revolutionary social realism. Damned as dehumanized decoration were equally slavish imitations of the abstract styles imported from other lands. "We strive," said the manifesto writers, "for an art that communicates in the clearest and most direct way possible our commitment...
Today the manifesto is no longer regarded as bombast: it cemented together a powerful group of young painters who are attracting an increasing amount of attention, not only at home but also abroad.* Though they were separately painting their agonized pictures before 1961, it was not until U.S. Art Critic Selden Rodman published his acerbic little book called The Insiders that they realized they had a philosophy in common. As a diatribe against abstraction. Rodman's book got a trouncing from many U.S. critics; as a summons to a "new humanism," it found an enthusiastic response in Mexico...
Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, A Private Correspondence. Exchanges full of bombast, flattery and genuine admiration between two writers who are probably only near geniuses, despite what they tell each other...
...Lowdown. In the early letters, the bombast is most conspicuous. "Skoal to the stanchless flux," young Durrell ends one letter. ''Shakespeare lack'd art" and "wrote from the waist down," he proclaims. Soon, however, it can be learned that Durrell is on to his avuncular admirer. Durrell exhorts Miller to read the Elizabethans for his own good, and Miller in turn-partly because he is writing a 1,000-page exegesis on Hamlet-is humbly asking Durrell for "the lowdown on Hamlet ... I can't bring myself to read the damned thing. But I am very...
...letters might have been just an exchange of bombast between a couple of literary bums but for the fact that each man is more than a bit right about the other. Each is touched by genius, each sees literature as a personal manifesto against a hostile world. They are not merely correspondents but confederates...