Word: conquests
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...crusade continues nonetheless. Kirkpatrick Sale kicked off the anticelebration with his anti-Columbus tome, The Conquest of Paradise. The group Encounter plans to celebrate 1992 by sailing three ships full of Indians to "discover" Spain. Similar merriment is to be expected wherever a quorum gathers to honor...
...friend of the explorer William Clark and indefatigable painter of native tribes; George Caleb Bingham, that vigorous orderer of American genre scenes; the landscapists Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran; and a host of lesser figures, who also played their part in the creation of a heroic imagery of national conquest. And here the difficulty rises, for Americans still wish to believe in the "historical" truth of their icons, which is what such pictures have become...
...West as America" comprises hundreds of items -- paintings, sculpture, prints, photographs, caricatures -- and is an enlightening exhibition, though not a consoling one. John Wayne would have disapproved. The exhibition shows how the vast exculpatory fiction of Manifest Destiny wound its way round the facts of conquest and turned them into art. It therefore does a valuable service, even in the banal aesthetic quality of much of the work in it -- those earnest efforts of small, provincial talents whose work would not be worth studying except for the clarity with which it enshrines the obsessive themes of an expansionist America...
...best catalog essays are by William H. Truettner: they set out the propagandistic themes of most Western art and are especially good on the ideology of "enlightenment" that supported and sugared the cruel facts of European conquest and expansion. Solid thought and research lie behind them, and though the conservative would complain that we know the story of Manifest Destiny's barbarous self-interest, the point is that until this show, we did not know (or certainly not in such detail) about its ramifications in painting and sculpture...
...still President of Iraq. The answer is that since withdrawing from Kuwait, Saddam has been playing by accepted rules; his abominations are once again in the category of internal affairs. Which suggests a disturbing line of speculation about Hitler himself: What if the Fuhrer had resisted the temptations of conquest and been content with the real estate of the Weimar Republic to build the Third Reich, complete with gas chambers and ovens? Would the world have done anything about...