Word: foregrounded
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...occurred several years after he had returned to France, in The Moroccans, 1915-16. In that dense, grand and mysterious painting, the intensity of light is evoked, with all the courage of paradox, with a predominant velvety black. The ambiguous forms -- Are the green curved objects in the left foreground melons, as some think, or the backsides of Muslims praying to Mecca? -- combine in a pictorial structure of wonderful explicitness and rigor. One sees in the work painters who would not be born for another 20 or 30 years: Frank Stella, Sean Scully. Clearly, though Matisse left Morocco, Morocco never...
...completely lacked the palms, writhing creepers, streams and waterfalls he would later give it. "The big mountain," he wrote to a friend, "grimly secludes itself in an immense circle of volcanic and comparatively barren country." The nearest palms were a hundred miles away. But without foreground vegetation, there was no hope of making the volcano look like a painting -- bringing it into the scheme of heroic Claudean and Turneresque landscape, the motif framed by arches of trees or cliffs in the foreground, with pictorial incidents unrolling back in space toward the distant peak. So, like all landscape painters, he "improved...
...America plunged into hatred and despair by the Civil War. The morning sun rises through the plume of smoke and ash, irresistibly, its disk made lurid but not extinguished by the subterranean fires, its light mirrored in a tranquil lake. Catastrophe will not wipe out nature; in the foreground of the volcanic plain, new plants spring to life. This, as the art historian David C. Huntington once remarked, is about as close as American painting in the Civil War period ever came to the Battle Hymn of the Republic or the Gettysburg Address...
...artist seems as explicit about this legerdemain as Velazquez. At 20, as The Waterseller attests, he was already a virtuoso of appearances. To be able to record both the half-sunken splash of water and the light dew of condensation on the pottery jar in the + foreground was to have touched a level of skill beyond that of most painters. But then the virtuosity is replaced by something deeper -- a meditation on the way the painter translates sight into mark and how the viewer turns mark back into sight. How can painting serve empirical ends and reveal truth? Only...
...Senator. Andover. Yale. Kennebunkport. What could be easier? But Bush reversed the normal equation. The man with four names jettisoned his g's, touted his taste for pork rinds and successfully put himself across as a regular guy. Bush persuaded voters to forget his background by pushing to the foreground the themes of cultural, not economic, populism: patriotism (the flag and the Pledge) and toughness on crime. His campaign has cynically mined the white fears and racism that feed this form of cultural populism. At the same time, the Bush campaign depicted Dukakis as a "Harvard elitist." Dukakis' initial lawyerly...