Word: gothic
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...subterranean tales. On the surface, civilized, well-educated characters move about in theoretical freedom, working out their destinies according to the dictates of reason and plausibility. But actually they are in thrall to hidden forces, submerged patterns, in danger of being swallowed up, say, by the plot of a gothic novel or the rigors of a Socratic dialogue. The outcome of such conflict can be comic or tragic or, when Murdoch is at her best, both. This time out, she is at her best...
Built around 1907, the Tudor-Gothic mansion was a fine example of careful stonework and superbly finished interiors, set down on a luxuriant plot of waterfront lawn on Jamaica Bay. It began as a residence for Henry Heinschiemer, an eccentric New York banker whose security system included a sign that read, GENTLE STRANGER TURN BACK. When the age of grand living had passed it by, the big home became a hospital for joint diseases, then a private school for retarded children and later a rabbinical school. Now it is a bag lady of a building. A fire has destroyed much...
...figure survives in England; to find a probable example, the organizers of this show had to borrow an exquisite polychrome Christ from Norway, where it had been made by a traveling English artist for a church in Bergen around 1230-45. Just as in the greatest monuments of English Gothic today -- the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral, say -- one sees only the bare background of a decorative and sculptural scheme whose figural richness can never be restored or even reimagined, so the remains of medieval sculpture that have been assembled for "The Age of Chivalry" cannot really evoke the culture...
...Chaucer, who installed English as a literary language in 1387 with The Canterbury Tales. The East Anglian manuscript style especially, in its whimsicality and odd narratives, its overflowing, obsessive love of natural forms -- leaves, flowers, birds, animals, combining and recombining -- is quite unlike the traditional formalities of French Gothic painting. It is both more earthy and more fantasticated. Some of it looks forward to the nature worship of the Romantics, centuries later. Some predicts writers like Edward Lear and Beatrix Potter. This, one realizes, is where the Englishness of English art was born: between the vellum sheets...
...London "The Age of Chivalry" evokes regret at how much English Gothic art has been lost to history, and delight at what survives...