Word: foregrounded
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...inversions and God-awful self-cultivations." By 1965, the only fact a self-respecting art historian would have deemed worthy of note about even the best of Benton's work, like The Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley (1934), would have been that the lank boy in the foreground, playing a mouth organ, was a portrait of Benton's ex-pupil Jackson Pollock...
Reed's present group suffered from such a severe loss of identity that even when it was their turn to shine, they were unable to burst forth into the foreground. In this way, they lingered on as a talented, but faceless, back-up band...
That kind of tense action is always in the foreground. But the background is continually in use as well. Polanski often has the shot divided in half down the middle, and while a character talks in one half the other is left for out-of-focus entrances, clues, touches of atmosphere. Faye Dunaway comes in that way, behind Nicholson telling a dirty joke. And in the background, literally and figuratively, is where the thirties settings stay, unpretentious, accessory: a blurry old Coke sign reminded me how much more obtrusive the nostalgia bit is in some other recent films, say Robert...
...triangular sails the way a folded napkin might sit on a table. It is this still-life sea, a geometrical image of repose and wellbeing, that suffuses some of Gris's finest still lifes, like the View of the Bay (see color overleaf), with its firmly composed foreground of earth-colored guitar suavely undulating below the combed sky and receding gray headlands...
...this energy because he forms them with lines that breathe and kick and cry with the force of a newborn child. In his drypoint "Umbrella by the Sea" (1948), he expresses the size and movement of an ocean by the spacing and fluidity of the line alone. In the foreground he makes his lines wide and gently curving, like lapping waves, gradually becoming choppier as he moves out to sea. Then lines become crowded, quick slashes of his stylus. In the same way, in his three reclining nudes (1939, 1941 and 1948), the surety of his stroke...