Word: cobalt
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...fling or dribble liquid pigment on the surface, it only looked like a mannerism. But her sense of drawing was so ingrained that she could cover a huge surface with notations that never palled: shifting tempo, direction, fatness of marks; she could (literally) paint up a storm. Works like Cobalt Night, 1962, or Charred Landscape, 1960, raise echoes of romantic "spectaculars," from Tintoretto to Oskar Kokoschka. They take a field of subject matter that Pollock was generally thought to have sealed off as his own-atmospheric space, roiled with stress and strain-and return it from the impromptu drip (which...
...staggering investment of energy. Imagine as many men as there are street corners, each of them doggedly propositioning every one of an infinite succession of out-of-town women passing by. Or imagine Luxembourg Gardens, where white metal chairs sit in pairs around a vast stretch of pink and cobalt flowers, and the same men walk round and round the flowerbeds each evening in summer, sinking into deep earnest conversations with whichever women will sit still for them. Occasionally my curiosity got the better of my irritation and I tried to make sense out of the spectacle by actually answering...
...with its own symbolic associations, which remain more or less constant through its use in architecture, print, neon, fabric design, packaging, food or painting. Red, for instance, pertains to magic and sorcery, vitality, fire and the conquest of evil spirits. Japanese color is grounded in nature: every indigo or cobalt dye runs, as it were, back to the sea. But the circuit between nature and abstraction is far shorter than in the West. Color has the peremptory quality of calligraphy: a gesture, an unmediated...
...always so gloomy. In the early 1970s, after nearly a decade of civil strife, the former Belgian Congo had achieved a measure of political stability under the dictatorship of President Mobutu Sese Seko. More important, the country was recognized as a treasure trove of gold, diamonds, oil, copper and cobalt. Banks rushed to extend credit. They were to rue the day. Notes one foreign banker in Kinshasa: "We did not do our sums properly...
Aside from export setbacks-prices for copper and cobalt dropped sharply-much of the loan money that flowed in was not spent wisely. Among Mobutu's development projects was a huge undertaking to dam the Zaïre River and to build a 1,100-mile-long power line to the Shaba copper-producing region at a total estimated cost of about $1 billion. Eight months after the power was finally turned on in 1981, the current was switched off. Shaba province happens to be self-sufficient in electricity. Says one Western diplomat: "If ever there was a white...