Word: complexity
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Great Rivers in Art" or "Paintings of Pigs") to loftier surveyals of important art forms. In the lofty class this week Manhattan's rich M. Knoedler & Co. presented "Classics of the Nude"-31 pictures from Pollaiuolo to Picasso. This was a good idea. The linear play and complex modeling of the human body, the textures, transparencies and color subtleties of the skin, have made nude painting what Bernard Berenson called "the most absorbing problem of classic art." To do the subject justice an exhibition would have to include several items not visible at Knoedler's. Among them...
Base of the conventional plowshare is an harmonic complex of two curves blending into one another. Because no machine could fit the contour exactly, these bases always had to be hand-polished. The "general-purpose bottom" of Oliver's new Raydex has a simple cylindrical curve which can be polished by machine, making production some 46 times faster and correspondingly cheaper. The conventional plowshare costs $4.25, will stand three resharpenings (about 75? apiece). Four Raydex points cost only $3.40, can be thrown away like razor blades and still save the farmer money as well as the trouble of finding...
...dream world which Dali has recorded is as specialized as it is vivid. Once a boy wonder at copying Vermeer and Leonardo, he discovered by self-analysis in Paris that he had a persecution complex (paranoia). His oil technique remains that of a brilliant, baleful Vermeer; his images are obsessive, malignant, and recur in painting after painting: unearthly shores and infinite plains, cliffs glowing with sunset, exhausted human profiles on flesh-blobs like stranded sea cows, attenuated human limbs held up by forked props and peduncles, shiny French telephones, lustrous big black ants. No. 1 criticism of Dali is that...
Jazz interests Scholar Sargeant but does not fascinate him. He finds it "an art without positive moral values, an art that evades those attitudes of restraint and intellectual poise upon which complex civilizations are built. At best it offers civilized man only a temporary escape into drunken self-hypnotism." Like the American skyscraper, movie plot and funny paper, Jazz has no conclusion. But, admits Author Sargeant, it has vitality and, maybe, a future...
...that modern life is a very complex affair is even more true than it is platitudinous. This complexity has confounded governments when they have attempted to regulate human relations. It has also confounded scholars and professors. So vast is the mass of knowledge today that no one dares to face the whole of it; and the result is that scholars have taken refuge in specialization. More and more have they drawn into their tight little corners of specific knowledge, completely curtained off from the rest of the room...