Word: garing
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...Gare d'Orsay, this building was once the grandest railway station in France. As the Musee d'Orsay, opening next week, it is now the world's best museum of its kind. Its conspectus of painting, sculpture, architecture and photography, representing the last half of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th century in France, is definitive. The Musee d'Orsay is to this period what the Uffizi is to the Italian Renaissance or the Museum of Modern Art to the 20th century. There are some masterpieces it will never get, but as a discourse of objects from...
Once a loud, murky place of grime and steam, like Monet's Gare SaintLazare, the cleaned-up St. Louis train shed has had a shopping mall and a new six- story hotel tucked inside. It is the architectural equivalent of the boat in the bottle, but the trick satisfies. The owners might have built a high- rise; fortunately, they deferred to the steel ceiling and let the architects, Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, spread the new buildings out. Planes and walls jag fetchingly, as in real cities. Rounding a corner or descending a stair, / there are architectural surprises. Store names...
...first deposited me by myself on French soil, the school where I was taking a course offered an orientation movie for its newest arrivals. The film was sweet; three interwoven plots presented the theme "Discovering Paris" by tracking three sets of starry-eyed tourists from their arrival at the Gare du Nord through their respective monument studded days. The most romantic segment followed a beautiful blonde model from Copenhagen en route to a day's shooting. Arriving early in the morning, the model wandered happily up the Champs Elysees, down the busy thoroughfares...paused at outdoor boutiques to finger exotic...
Today, surrounded by art that rejects formal grace in the interest of narrative, contradiction and hyperbole, we are conditioned to see a different Manet. In eyes that have viewed DeChirico's train stations, for instance, Manet's painting of a woman and a child at the Gare St.-Lazare acquires a strangeness that contradicts his intention of painting a peaceful urban scene. The grown woman stares at the painter, the little girl turns her back and gazes raptly through the iron bars into an industrial future, full of clamor and swift disjunction. For each phase of modernism there...
...this is a pleasant theory to have much more, so than a theory that would confine me to a life of serving others. Yet for a long time I found solace in this idea, and it buffered me when driving through Roxbury or Dorehester or seeing an ad for GARE on TV, I would feel little twinges of guilty conscience that perhaps there was some thing I could do to help even great disparities that exist in our society...