Word: callas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...American Art. But both spirits, the dark leatherboy and the angel of light, preside jointly in most of the 111 works on display. The obsessions with sex and death that are palpable in his scenes of heavy leather are still visible in the phallic tumescence and mortal shadows of Calla Lily, 1984. The straightforward but unreal quality of the S-M images is there again in his portrait of Ken Moody and Robert Sherman, 1984 -- two hairless heads, one black, one white, an uncanny feeling built from blunt facts. After a while, even the taut compositions of Mapplethorpe's portraits...
...gravity: it could stand in for religious icons. Even a relatively small easel painting like Flower Day, 1925, is consciously hieratic in its symmetry, the stillness of its squat figures, the blazing epiphanic color and the clear identification of the Indian flower bearer, bowed under his angelic load of calla lilies, with a priest bowing before celebrants. And though dreadful excesses of cheap tourist cliche would sprout from Rivera's fusion of the thick crankshaft rhythms of pre-Columbian sculpture with the observed faces and bodies of Mexican peasants, there can be no doubt that in his hands, at least...
...skull, and that bone repeating the ancient permanence of mountain line -- without grasping that some transaction beyond the simply formal or factual is afoot. This is particularly true with her flower paintings: magnified closeups, filling the whole surface, of a black iris, a jack-in-the-pulpit, or a calla lily. Almost from the moment that they were first exhibited at Stieglitz's gallery in the mid-'20s, these were interpreted as sexually coded images, and since O'Keeffe is now one of the icons of feminism, this reading is unlikely to change. She always denied it, with asperity...
Fade in: Midnight at the Tartikoff home in the Coldwater Canyon section of Beverly Hills. Baby Daughter Calla Lianne has awakened, and her parents are trying to lull her back to sleep to the strains of the Tonight show. The guest is Comedian Bill Cosby, who is doing a funny routine about the trials of middle-aged parents. As the father watches, a light goes on in his head...