Word: claustral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pigment into a field of hatchings. There is so much overpainting and layering in her recent work that the paintings seem to have grown excruciatingly slowly. They carry a patina of doubt on every square inch of their surface. But they do breathe: light and air -- of a rather claustral kind, but atmosphere just the same -- bathe the bodies and unify them as objects in the world while threatening always to dissolve them as emblems of personality. The surfaces look as if they came via Philip Guston from Monet, picking up some of Giacomo Balla's futurist dissections of light...
...change this condition with a work of social criticism hat reads like a novel, though she makes no Mailerian claims for the achievement. She heartily dislikes Tarnower, his "repilian" face, his dictatorial and unimaginative diet book and his Westchester, N.Y., house, which she finds "Japanoid" and "claustral." From testimony and private conversation, she concludes that the cardiologist was "a small-time emotional imperialist," and "a glutton for other people's vulnerabilities." She gleefully notes that he took a nightly laxative mixed with applesauce and that, according to the autopsy report, the deceased was overweight by the standards set forth...