Word: cle
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...culture they discuss and, as art history, are not pitched at the level of scholarship a European audience feels entitled to. But it is the work that counts, and must be seen, in all its energy and episodic magnificence: a vast panorama, from the haunted fin-de-siècle symbolist canvases of Mikhail Vrubel to the last attempts, by painters like Alexander Deineka, to combine a social message with a post-cubist idiom before the freeze...
More often, Nin's tone is languid, dreamy; she clutters her stage with fin de siècle props and elegant clothes. Her potential lovers meet in artist's studios or Parisian sidewalk cafés. Traditional pornography gets to the point quickly, setting out the sexual ABCs with no nonsense. Nin, however, lingers over the calligraphy; she works as hard keeping her partners apart as she does bringing them together...
...reau began by shifting the action from the upholstered, hypocritical fin de siècle to the 1930s, in the shadow of Nazism. to the 1930s, in the shadow of Nazism. He and Designer Richard Peduzzi placed the singers amidst stark mausoleum-like sets in monochromatic blacks and grays, all vast, sterile spaces and icy slabs of marble. The results captured the harsh, merciless qualities of the opera perhaps too well. They were undeniably powerful, particularly in the hair-raising scene in which Lulu guns down Schon on an enormous staircase. They were also brutal and at times faintly ludicrous...
...then came one of the grandest scams of all. In 1910, Backhouse and J.O.P. Bland, a London Times China watcher, published China under the Empress Dowager. The memoir was based on the diary of Ching-shan, a fin de siècle Manchu courtier. Backhouse claimed to have found this trove of gossip and intelligence in its author's house during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. The diary became the jewel of the Oxford collection; scholars may have debated its authenticity, but hardly a soul dared suggest that Backhouse himself had written it. Now Trevor-Roper, revealing...
...reflections of silver flesh and gold hair, is perversely liturgical-a parody (done, one should recall, for a public whose cultural background was still Catholic) of medieval head reliquaries. The image, however, is not a saint or a magdalen but that sibylline bitch of the fin-de-siècle imagination, the Fatal Woman, La Belle Dame sans Merci-enigmatic as a sphinx, cruelly indifferent as a Byzantine empress, wearing the features of the Divine Sarah and the aggressive glitter of a vintage Cadillac fender...