Word: eye
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Australian by birth, TIME art critic Robert Hughes tends to view his adopted land--and its art--with an anthropologist's eye. That's probably as it should be. America, he likes to remind us, is an immigrant society, and its art reflects the cultures of its settlers. For the past three years, Hughes has been trying to capture the essence of these cultural accretions. One result is an 88-page special report titled American Visions, which will reach our subscribers and newsstands across the country this week...
...mixed reviews, her plays were popular successes. But as ?Rage for Fame? ends, with Clare?s election to Congress in 1942, the Luces are visibly at odds -- and clearly not for the last time. Morris struggles for fairness but portrays Luce as a calculating, self-indulgent user whose fixed eye on the main chance rendered her oblivious to the concerns of others. Considering the trials that lay ahead for Luce, it?s a safe bet that Morris? second volume will be just as compelling as the first...
...carried forward by other painters. It wasn't so long ago that people thought of John James Audubon (1785-1851) as a gifted illustrator, an "ornithological artist"--but he was far more than that. He was a great formal painter with (almost literally, one might say) an eagle eye. To create his great work The Birds of America, four volumes showing 497 species, life-size and engraved in full color on the largest sheets of paper then available, he would shoot each bird and wire up its corpse on a board in an attitude that seemed both aesthetically pleasing...
...appetite for the real, the pragmatic and the scientifically verifiable had long been resident in 19th century America. But it was brought to a peak in the wake of the Civil War. The journalistic eye was equal, as a transmitter of (sometimes unbearable) reality, to that of the novelist or poet; the camera replaced the draftsman in reportage. This was new. American public culture was now driven by technique--the skills that built bridges and docks and railroads, the scientific laws that underwrote Americans' conquest of their environment. There was no ghost in the machine, only the machine itself...
Perhaps the most interesting painter to reflect this mood was John Frederick Peto (1854-1907), who specialized in eye-fooling, hypernaturalistic still life. In his work, the image of the martyred Lincoln recurs frequently, to the point of obsession, usually taking the form of a daguerreotype pinned to the board or pushed under a tape. Peto was praised for what Americans traditionally liked, skill and illusionistic power (How the hell did he do that?). But his deeper anxiety and the hints of an imperiled social order, reflected in the entropy of his objects, were lost on viewers...