Word: emblems
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Roof, with its layers of grandiloquent Southern mendacity, might serve as an emblem for the life of its creator. The playwright with the arresting name of Tennessee was born plain Thomas; Williams wreathed himself in beguiling inventions and evasions. Some of these were the by-product of a well-meaning gentility, as in his and his family's attempts to veil from the world the tragedy of his sister Rose, whose schizophrenia ended catastrophically in a lobotomy. Some were solitary acts of cool calculation, as when he lopped three years off his age to render himself eligible for a young...
...this point the author is unfair. The question is how anyone could not read the play along political lines. People view Heidi as an emblem for the women's movement itself, so that her decision is seen as a defeat for feminism. Wasserstein, who was herself an activist not unlike Heidi, wrote the play to confront her resignation from superwoman-hood, and the sadness she felt at remaining single with no children. Heidi's path mirrored the one she herself would have chosen, but for ardent feminists, this...
...portrait of his Irish lover, Jo Hiffernan, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl. Shown in London first and then in Paris, it provoked a buzz of irrelevant interpretation. The expressionless young woman in virginal white, standing on a wolfskin with a lily in her hand (that floral emblem of the Aesthetic Movement), was declared to be a bride the night after; or a fallen ex-maiden; or a victim of mesmerism--anything, except what she was, a model posing in Whistler's studio to give him a pretext to paint shades of white with extreme virtuosity and subtlety...
...details of the movie are striking. The vest always worn by flight director Kranz is delivered to him just before launch, complete with the mission emblem attached to the front pocket. The return trajectory is calculated using a slide rule. The baseball caps given to the astronauts aboard the recovery ship are exactly like the ones that were really worn by the returning spacemen...
Chief among the former was, of course, Picasso, who emerged from the German Occupation of France an emblem of noncollaboration, a hero of the left and of artists in general. His bronze Death's Head, 1943, is the perfect image for the show's beginning: a cannonball of impacted death, heavier than any imaginable head. Massacre in Korea, 1951, asserts continuity by quoting Goya and thus morosely pointing out that the disasters of war only recur. The cluster of gun barrels leveled at the weeping women comes directly out of Goya's The Third of May. They are fantasy weapons...