Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Gene Age, nor Israel Rosenfield, Edward Ziff, and Borin Van Loon, authors of DNA for Beginners, would necessarily recognize their kin-ship to populist mayor Vellucci. They have adapted to very different environments from Vellucci and from each other: The Gene Age is a clone from the hard-driving, earnest, and competent American biotechnology industry, while DNA for Beginners evolved from the genial and sardonic humor of the English academic New Left...
...Singleton Copley, there were 100 on Pollock and 200 on Picasso. The track of pioneer scholars in this field, like John Baur and Lloyd Goodrich, was hardly more beaten than Lewis and Clark's. It was as though, by general consent, all American art had been sunk in earnest provinciality until the 1940s, when abstract expressionism unburdened itself upon the world stage. Nobody believes this today. In fact, the pendulum has gone so far in the other direction that a sea piece by any Boston dauber distantly connectable to Fitz Hugh Lane will command a price that...
Copley never did master the grand manner as prescribed by Reynolds. His huge, ambitious history painting, Watson and the Shark, 1778, is a beloved American classic thanks to, not in spite of, its earnest potpourri of quotations from Titian, Raphael, the Borghese Gladiator and the Laocoon. But at the level of the portrait he was exact and forceful. The tight, heavy faces, didactic hands and subtly registered expressions of Copley's New Englanders read like indexes of American character, and his painting of Thomas and Sarah Mifflin (1773) is one of the great 18th century images of the enlightened...
...handful of mostly traditional sketches, long on premise and short on development. Guest Star Steve Martin (who can be funny just standing still) opened the show with some mincing mimickry of Michael Jackson's distinctive footwork. In one skit Jeff Goldblum (The Big Chill) played an earnest, geeky math teacher who yearned to belt out Tom Lehrer-like songs for the faculty talent show...
Timid, tongue-tied, earnest to a fault, Gilbert de La Fayette did not seem bound for glory. He embarrassed himself on horseback, stumbled on the dance floor. But he had a fine old name, and after his father died when Gilbert was two years old and his mother when he was twelve, Gilbert came into a handsome fortune. Hating court life in the Versailles of Louis XV, the marquis went into the army. At 19, with only the briefest of military training, he set off to become a hero of the American Revolution...