Word: foregrounded
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ARECENT TIME article on Puerto Rico carried the obligatory and classic photograph of a Latin American city. In the foreground stand shacks, slum alleys, and ragged brown children; in the background rise white concrete and glass office buildings. One can find such an image of inequality in Caracas, Lima, Mexico City, or San Juan. It appears to make a profound statement about contrasts in underdeveloped countries, until one recalls the famous photo poster of the Sixties showing dilapidated shacks, broken streets, and ragged black children. In that case, however, the city was Northeast Washington D.C., and the structure...
...childhood was substance rather than fantasy: tactile memories of mold, mud, woodgrain and brick became some of the most "painterly" painting in the history of art. The foreground of The Leaping Horse is all matter, and the things in it-squidgy earth, tangled weeds and wild flowers, prickle of light on the dark skin of water sliding over a hidden ledge-are troweled and spattered on with ecstatic gusto...
...peasants are large. They fill the foreground. They make it uncomfortable to be the traditional audience of salon painting, the middle-class observer. They are also deliberately iconic. Herbert points out that in Millet's Going to Work, 1850, the young peasant couple striding through the fields is based on Masaccio's fresco of Adam and Eve, expelled from Eden and condemned to labor. This resonance is deepened by the potato basket on the wife's head and by the thong she carries like the attribute of a martyr...
...covers any more. There's a city skyline in silver-gray behind a row of little houses on their little plots. There's a huge expanse of green in front, and six naked people are carrying a boa constrictor through it. This is no background, this is foreground...
...design, Barry Lyndon is marvelously simple. The first half offers something like a documentary of 18th century manners and morals. To be sure, a lot happens to Barry in this segment-first love, first duel, first wanderings, first military combat-but he remains pretty much a figure in the foreground, rather like those little paper cutouts architects place on their models to give a sense of scale. What matters to the director is the world beyond, the world Barry is so anxious to conquer...