Word: caryatid
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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...
...divisible string of moments, and Hine had an uncanny eye for the right one. An Italian woman, carrying a floppy bundle of sweatshop piecework on her head through the Lower East Side, is transformed into an icon of labor - solid as a young Mother Courage, but turned into a caryatid by the iron lamp post that rises above her head, exactly on the axis of her body...
...Museum Trips" from a forthcoming book by Carl Nagin is a short, funny story about a visit to the Fogg. In the Modern Art Room Rocko and the Narrator meet an employee who "wouldn't givya a nickel" for the $70,000 Brancusi wood sculpture Caryatid, which he calls Mrs. Murphy's Bedpost. He calls a Jackson Pollack "that horror over there" and says it was hung on its side last month, but he likes Olitski's Ariosto's Kiss because the "painting seems to move." They visit the Persian Rug Room twice, but the rugs are on the wall...
...like a bemused headmaster. Wearing ankle-high combat boots that go back to his Army days,* he roams the halls, wiping dust off display cases, bellowing "Please don't touch the art objects!" when kids tweak a sphinx's beard, or sternly lecturing an adult caressing a caryatid's curple: "That's 4,000 years old. If everyone who saw that had touched it, it wouldn't be here...
...offbeat tastes. But as architectural monuments are bulldozed into extinction across the land, a new group of collectors is springing up - architectural buffs who first picket to preserve the best of the old, then, if the wreckers move in, haunt the ruins in hopes of rescuing a cornice, a caryatid, a cartouche, an ornamented corbel, or some Tiffany glass...