Word: contrapposto
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...pretty much had to be European or gay, or both. Then you would find your way into her paintings, as did the theater critic Carl Van Vechten, author of the novel Nigger Heaven and prime link between downtown white New York and the Harlem Renaissance, posing in rapturously exaggerated contrapposto in 1922's Portrait of Carl Van Vechten on a red stool on a black rug on a red carpet; while in Portrait of Stieglitz, 1928, the shoe and cane (nothing else) of artist Charles Demuth enter from the left, and the gloved, ermine-cuffed hand of the preposterous...
...sudden movement. And by the early to mid-'60s, the time of the great triptychs, when Bacon decisively abandoned the "spectral," scumbled evocations of the face used in his Popes and caged businessmen, his figures had begun to embody an immense plastic power. Sometimes these creatures, knotted in contrapposto, seem desperately mannered; but there are other moments when the smearing and knotting of flesh, not so much depicted as reconstituted in the fatty whorls and runs of paint, take on a tragic density closer to Michelangelo than to modernism. Among those artists who, in the past century, have tried...
Pollock's early work is permeated by the forms of mannerist contrapposto, the serpentine figures of 16th century art, and there is more than just an echo of the strange excavated space of El Greco's paintings, simultaneously vast and womblike, in his work after 1947. Because of his aspirations to sublimity, it is difficult to assimilate Pollock-as some authorities have wished to do-to the traditions of the School of Paris. The French painter he most admired, the surrealist André Masson, was set against the pre-eminently French virtues of lucidity, calm...
...best is the 12-in. by 9-in. brush drawing A Young Woman in Street Costume. Despite its smallness, the purity of the girl's soft profile gives it the monumentality of proud, aloof youth. His Picasso study of a mother and child, making a contrapposto of shoulders and hands, is superlative enough to make the Blue Period of 1904 seem a perfect neighbor to Mantegna's 15th century touch. For Sachs, it was the exquisite image in itself; nothing else mattered...
Motel automatically rises to the level of theatre when Siobhan McKenna speaks or moves or even stands in her contrapposto fashion, but against the cliche of line, improbability of story, and a pseudo-realism of cursing, bedroom scenes, and drunkenness, which make the characters less than two dimensional, she cannot possibly attain her usual brilliance...
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