Word: dourness
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Goya had wriggled out of his old, gregarious personality. He emerged as the dour genius the world now knows. In the fading, Baroque art of Goya's day, charm was the watchword. Goya brushed charm aside; he no longer cared to please. Throughout his career, he had listened to others' orders and carried them out amiably enough. Now he no longer heard his orders; he gradually ceased to obey, and even to reply. Except for official portraits, Goya's art stopped being a succession of answers to the world's demands and became simply statements...
Ugliness & Grandeur. Hopper had the initial good luck to study with Robert Henri, the No. 1 professor of the "Ash Can School" (TIME, May 16), who inspired him to paint the world he saw as he saw it. At first, his vision of his world was too dour to please art .collectors, and in the course of 23 long years he sold only two paintings. But with the Depression, Hopper's harsh, lonely ancbhard-bitter view-of America became-understandable to millions. Through the man-made ugliness he most often chose to paint, a raw but very human grandeur...
...Around dour Glasgow, there were seats to be won or lost by the hair of a sporran. Stubby Scotsmen in sack suits, caps pulled down and pipes jutting from the crags of their faces, listened to the rough organ music of Aneurin Bevan. "In the Labor Party, it's true we've been having an argument about the hydrogen bomb, and I've been in the middle of it to a certain extent." The crowd laughed appreciatively at his understatement. "We argue . . . over our policy . . . We don't reach our policy in quiet country houses...
...sculptors today. Mostly they weld metal figures of a tormented yet unsympathetic sort. Forbiddingly invested with knobs, prickles and outright spikes, the figures imprison a bit of free air and defy anyone to invade it. David Hare's sculptures were a happy exception to the grim parade. Long dour as the rest, Hare has now invented a new and carefree impressionism. His Sunrise creates an effect of light and loftiness out of a rock, some steel bars and cut bronze sheets tinted with gold. Another exception was Richard Lippold, who makes exquisite geometric constructions of thin wire...
...rich, landowner father had no use for poetry, and wanted his son to train for the law. Ovid obediently did, but he was far fonder of Rome's artist colony and social whirl. His love lyrics were popular with all but the Emperor Augustus, a dour Cromwellian sort, who found Ovid's lively spirit immoral and subversive. In A.D. 8, he banished the poet to lifelong exile in a Black Sea village, but not before Ovid had capped his fame with a masterpiece which never saw more than first-draft form, the Metamorphoses, or the Stories of Changing...