Word: chiaroscuro
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What then was the secret of Edison's inventiveness? The core of it must remain as elusive as the mystery of why Rembrandt handled chiaroscuro so masterfully; it was an inborn gift, honed by practice but unteachable. Nobel-prizewinning Physicist Isidor I. Rabi, for one, maintains that Edison could no more have stopped himself from inventing than a born punster can refrain from playing word games. Robert Conot, author of a 1979 biography of Edison, A Streak of Luck, observes that Edison's mind "multiplied devices from a single idea like a dividing amoeba and then compartmentalized...
...much. This is partly his own doing. His first two books came out of a writing class that he took at Harvard in the late 1940s, and his fiction has continued to radiate qualities dear to the hearts of academic critics: fractured narrative lines, surrealistic landscapes surrounded by the chiaroscuro of despair, irony, symbols galore and, most important, a self-conscious sense of being difficult. Small wonder that so much of his work has seemed to move straight from printing press to college syllabus. Yet it has never been necessary to go to school to acquire a taste for Hawkes...
...designed to expand its narrative meaning through pictorial composition. Many sequences contain shots of memorable visual beauty-never for their own sake, because the composition of the images is always subordinated to the pictorial event. The conversation between Allen and Diane Keaton in the planetarium is saturated with chiaroscuro density which can challenge, graphically, the famous "Aquarium Sequence" in Welles' Lady from Shanghai. The function of darkness and use of galactical phenomena which often dominate the stationary frame, add considerably to the philosophical implications of the Allen-Keaton interchange in this sequence. Although highly sophisticated, the optical effects...
...huge sea walls that protect Venice's lagoon. It was an image of massiveness that was to inspire Piranesi. From the busy Venetian theaters, he learned the art of stage design, which in those times ran to imposing fixed backdrops where ornate buildings receded in dramatic chiaroscuro. At 20, Piranesi landed a job in Rome as a junior draftsman in the retinue of a Venetian ambassador. He yearned to do his own buildings, but as he wrote despondently, "No buildings of today display the magnificence of the old ... nor is there any prince or private man inclined to create...
...Objects for acidulous social criticism can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The hand belongs to Edward Sorel, a chiaroscuro cartoonist in the merciless tradition of Daumier and Thomas Nast. With a pen dipped in corrosive sublimate, Sorel uncovers the Presidents from Harry Truman as a Keystone Kop to Jimmy Carter in the throes of a scatological tantrum. No one is safe from Sorel: he skewers Arabs and Zionists, harpoons Cardinal Cooke and Billy Graham, lampoons the Jerry Lewis telethon: "Maybe some day science will find a cure for Multiple No-Talent." Sorel's style is best...