Word: gazed
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...curved stairway leads up to the second floor, where daintily appointed meeting rooms play host to scores of organizations. The reading room--which houses an impressive collection of magazines and books--is situated to the left. If, on a winter's night, a traveler were to cast her gaze towards the right, she would likely espy the many rooms of the main dining area. Said dining area is decorated in the rococo style, with sturdy tables and chairs providing a much-needed visual respite from the ornate chandeliers and rugwork...
...Realism's unabashed fantasy. Realism in Stalinist terms did not mean painting things as they were or even as they might be: the inevitability of Socialist progress erased that conditional "might," along with the gap between present and future. That which will be already is, under the world-sustaining gaze of Comrade Stalin. Ideology ascribed to Stalin the actual role of God, the creation of reality itself...
What you see, what confronts and monopolizes your gaze, is a woman on the floor in the foreground. Her bulk is colossal, almost comic. She simply blows away the decorum of the nude -- the ideal body re-formed by thought. She isn't nude but aggressively naked, a biological mountain: swollen thighs and belly, pubic ravine, breasts like boulders, their stretch marks and blotches half- echoing the surface texture of the girl's cloth. The strength of her presence isn't due just to her depicted fatness but to the way the image burgeons from dense paint, a heavy mass...
Ruskin would not, however, have approved of Freud's nudes, any more than some feminists do today. These figures, splayed under the inquisitorial electric light and the downward gaze of the artist, are the mainstay of his work, and the fierceness with which they reject the softening conventions of the "studio nude" has provoked a bumper crop of balderdash about Freud's supposed misogyny and sexism. (Freud's own riposte, in a recent interview, was terse: "I think the idea of misogyny is a stimulant to feminists, and it's rather like anti-Semites looking for Jewish noses everywhere...
...stereotypical as a formerly-imprisoned teleevangelist, but Baskin tries to make the most of his purposely cheesy lines, greeting Donna with "God bless your four chambered heart" and "God bless your ventricles." As the gullible, God-loving Donna, Katie Guillory doesn't seem to know where to focus her gaze on stage, which makes her performance a bit too spacy and distracted. Kessler occasionally overstretches reality--the idea of Donna writing "God" on an envelope of money is amusing, but Peter's apparently sincere wonderment over the mailman's new Mercedes is difficult to believe...