Word: caryatid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...theatrical only at one point, where it should be: the key exhibits of its architectural section, at the far end of the nave, are two astounding models of the Paris Opera by Richard Peduzzi. One is a transverse section -- the ultimate doll's house, with every balustrade, fresco, gilded caryatid and square of marble inlay faithfully reproduced -- and the other is a site model under a glass floor, so that one walks in air across the entire quartier, like a balloonist...
...gone into displaying the continuities between 19th and 20th century art and correcting the myth that the modern art that mattered represented a wrenching break with the past. Without the culture of the salon and the Academy, no Matisse; you cannot imagine a work like Constantin Brancusi's Caryatid, 1940, without its triple root in the peasant woodcarvings of the artist's native Rumania, his study of African sculpture and his passion for the archaic Mediterranean...
...columns, when Turkish gunpowder stored inside it was hit by true-eyed artillery men of the Venetian Republic, firing near by from the Hill of the Muses? Or that in the 19th century, the seventh Earl of Elgin would carry down from the hill pediment statues and one maidenly caryatid, all doomed to sail in ships made of wood to a foreign place not loved by thundering Zeus, the British Museum...
Hopper never lost his grasp of the poetic possibilities of such utterances. It stayed with him right to the end and produced some miraculously unsparing images, notably the figure of his wife Jo, A Woman in the Sun, 1961, standing like a middle-aged caryatid on a plinth of golden light in the bare Hopperian room, wearing nothing but a cigarette. In it, the distances between wall and wall, window and sky, or the lit edge of the curtain and the worn radiant torso, take on something of the strangeness of the space in a good De Chirico. The body...