Word: foregrounds
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
SHORT STORIES ARE BEST when the background can be assumed and the foreground is fleshed out. Henry James, obsessed with inner life to a degree unhealthy for a writer using this form, allowed his short pieces to balloon into "nouvelles", because the psychological world he described in The Turn of the Screw or The Beast in the Jungle was uncharted in the 1890s. He could assume little knowledge and less sympathy on the part of his audience, and thus created his world painstakingly...
...contrast, the characters in the Freshman Register seem, at first glance, to be clearly in the foreground. The invisible bureaucrats and administrators of Rules Relating had neither faces nor identities; this slim volume provides both, for nearly 1500 freshmen. And as much as Rules Relating and Courses of Instruction, this is a book with a purpose, a function that far outweighs its stylistic merits. Given, say, the name of a freshman, one can quickly determine where he lives, where he prepped and what field he intends to concentrate his college studies, and one can also get a reasonable idea...