Word: daly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sculptor Simmons' sculpture looks like surrealism, but she is no dilly-Dali-er. Her pieces tell stories with such imagination that each tells something different to every onlooker. Immunity (see cut) shows a placid feminine face resting on a hand, amid the broken sections of a wheel. In Waiting an old woman looks down two flights of stairs, while a clock's hand nears 12 and a high-heeled slipper crosses from one flight to the next...
Caught in the crystal like flies in amber were Surrealist Salvador Dali's woman with bureau drawers for breasts, a massive Spanish fountain by Etcher Sir Muirhead Bone, an opium-ridden fantasy of Painter-Poet Jean Cocteau, a woman feeding hens, by Iowa's Grant Wood. Even the shading of characteristic artists' tools was faithfully reproduced, from the wavy Japanese brush strokes of Isamu Noguchi's cat to the sculptural modeling of a Maillol nude...
...that Very Warm for May lacks "ideas." Rather, it is swamped by them. Providing an elaborate burlesque of summer barn theatres, with their mauve-tinted playwrights, dimwit patronesses and clod-like performers, it lunges wildly in every direction. It jazzes up Freud, mimics Dali, writhes and wriggles, gambols and glides, rains schottisches, streams gavottes, blows ballets. The atmosphere, at its thickest, is very warm for mayhem. The whole thing suggests perfectly the hysterical side of summer theatres, but doesn't turn the funny side into laughs...
While the audience in Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House waited & waited for the curtain to rise, they whiled away the time by reading in their programs an apologia-by Surrealist Salvador Dali himself-for the surrealist ballet they were about...
...audience was quite willing to believe it. When at long last the curtain rose on Dali's brand-new setting for the Venusberg Bacchanale scene from Wagner's Tannhäuser they saw what they had come for. At the back of the stage, before a punctured mountain on a windswept plain, an ossified swan spread 15-ft. wings. In and out of its ruptured, bony breast the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo's ballerinas climbed like the maggoty stuffing of a decayed Thanksgiving turkey. In the orchestra pit the staid Metropolitan Opera orchestra surged and noodled...