Word: elegiac
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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ALBERT PINKHAM RYDER, National Museum of American Art, Washington. Ryder (1847-1917) was a familiar type -- the unwashed, eccentric recluse -- but his small, shadowy paintings are unlike anything seen before or since: elegiac, visionary, haunting. Through July...
...work -- a terrorized family here, a plugged-in TV salesman there. But director John McNaughton, who wrote the spare script with Richard Fire, shows few of Henry's dozen or so crimes. Instead he reveals the victims, at the scenes of their deaths, in slow zoom shots accompanied by elegiac music. He is a coroner with a touch of the poet...
...almost any survey of 20th century culture, World War II is a watershed: now, at the century's end, American graphic designers seem inordinately inspired by elegiac European modernists of the years before the war (early Soviets, Man Ray, Dadaists) and by the tantalizing, electric strangeness of postwar Japan. As in architecture, the revival of old styles creates some time-warp curiosities. In one of the display cases, designer Carin Goldberg's faux-1930s book jacket for a 1988 edition of Camus sits near books actually from the era -- and the new piece seems more evocative of the bygone...
...elegiac title poem Westward is about another journey, from London's Euston Station by rail toward the Western Isles of Scotland. Contemplating Margaret Thatcher's England, she reflects on the "frayed-/ out gradual of the retreat from empire." The Prairie is a reverie, expressed with extreme simplicity, on the peregrinations of her forebears from the Midwest to California and back again. "To be landless, half a nomad, nowhere wholly/ at home, is to discover, now, an epic theme/ in going back," she concludes. Clampitt is wisest when she is plainest. At her best, she writes poetry that, in Marianne Moore...
...yellow-and-white Great Hall was packed with notables, ranging from Raisa Gorbachev to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, when Rostropovich came striding out on stage, threw kisses in all directions and then raised his arms to begin. He had chosen a program full of sad messages: first Samuel Barber's elegiac Adagio for Strings; then Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" Symphony, which Rostropovich had performed at his last Moscow concert 16 years ago; then Shostakovich's anguished Fifth Symphony, written at the height of Stalin's purges in 1937. (In three subsequent concerts, two of them in Leningrad, Rostropovich would also perform the Prokofiev...