Word: faune
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...naked boy stands at the edge of the woods, butt twisted toward the camera. The weeds in the foreground are excruciatingly in-focus. The title is "Marble Faun," evoking Hawthorne's primal America. The photographer is Fred Holland Day, a forgotten Bostonian who was famous in his time...
...Camera: The Photographs of F. Holland Day, at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, is full of precious works, the produce of a rich New Englander with good intentions and a penchant for Japanese knick-knacks. Looking at "Marble Faun," one wonders how Day took himself seriously. Historical sympathy will provide all the answers, of course, but the juxtaposition of photography with such old-fashioned subject matter and composition still seems unusual. It is strange to see sharp, crisp weeds that could be a picture in a biology textbook within the same frame as the 19th-century figure...
...looks perfectly capable of donning tutu and toe shoes and filling in for any of the women in her 16-member company. But she doesn't need to, and that's the point. Her versions of such classics as George Balanchine's Apollo and Jerome Robbins' Afternoon of a Faun, danced by a troupe of near youngsters and up-and-comers, glisten and gleam as though the choreographers had personally stopped backstage to apply one last coat of polish...
Thus we still don't know, and perhaps never will, what is going on in Dosso's Allegory with Pan, circa 1529-32. Maybe the lascivious goat god (if it really is Pan, and not just an ordinary faun) is lusting after the beautiful Titianesque nymph asleep on the ground--who has been variously argued to be Antiope, Pomona, Echo, Canens and Syrinx, among other nymphs with literary pedigrees. But who is the old woman, and what is she doing? If her outstretched palms are protecting the girl, she's facing the wrong direction--away from...
...clear-cut dramatic situations. "What really interests me," he said in 1958, "is the conduct of man, the rites he performs to face the mysteries of life." The Cage portrays a tribe of ferocious, insect-like women who kill the men with whom they mate; in Afternoon of a Faun, two dancers meet in a studio for a sensuous yet self-absorbed encounter that ends in an oddly tentative kiss. Later, Robbins adopted the plotless style of Balanchine, his mentor and idol, firmly denying that his new works were "about" anything but movement and music. Dancegoers knew better. Dances...