Word: europeanize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...suffused with "a language strong, moral and imaginative." His paintings--mostly of the Hudson Valley and vistas of South American grandeur--were greeted as both religious icons and triumphs of observation, fusing piety and science in one matrix. Church hit a peculiarly American vein of feeling: Romanticism without its European component of alienation and dread, a view of the universe in which God was in heaven and all was basically right with the world...
...chief shared signs of American identity, and it became a prime subject of the country's art. "In the beginning," wrote John Locke in the 17th century, "all the world was America." It was not necessarily a reassuring thought, for America seemed very strange to its first European settlers, particularly the Puritans in New England. To them, its rocky coast and tangled woods were--in the expressive phrase used by one of them--"the Lord's waste," an unowned biblical desert full of strange beasts and savage half-men. However, although America produced no significant landscape painting or religious...
...doll, gazed at by an adoring slave boy in a silver collar. The balustrade behind him and the formal gardens and pavilions behind that are complete fictions. No properties in America looked like this. Kuhn was meeting the illusory desire of Colonial gentry to seem like important extensions of European culture. It would be a recurrent fantasy. Fifty years later, in Boston, one sees John Singleton Copley doing much the same in some of his portraits. But in another hundred years, with the growth of American wealth, grandeur began to get real...
...Islamic world. Recent polls suggest that 96% of Americans believe in a personal God and that 78% of them think their consciousness will survive death and go, after judgment, to heaven or hell. Its earliest colonists in the Northeast--Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers, "Pennsylvania Dutch"--were all seeking to flee European persecution and corruption (as they saw it) and trying to set up various kinds of religious Utopias. The main tool of Catholic Spain's colonization in the Southwest was the Franciscan mission. And yet the paradoxical fact is that the U.S. has never produced a substantial body of formal religious...
Patrons, architects and artists didn't just want to imitate the Renaissance; they hoped to outdo it. Americans could take the trophies of high European culture and make them their own. Above all, they connected to the Renaissance by buying it. The Gilded Age began the process whereby the museum began to supplant the church as the emblematic focus of American cities. The suction of American capital was turned on the old collections of Europe. Out of it came some of the greatest museums in the world, from the encyclopedic Metropolitan in New York to the choice Isabella Stewart Gardner...