Word: gothically
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...believe that it is fairly well known that Nan Wood Graham was the woman who posed for American Gothic [May 10], but I have always been puzzled about why the identity of the man in this famous painting should be so shrouded in anonymity. He was Dr. B. H. McKeeby, and he was a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, dentist. It is a local Cedar Rapids legend-this being a case where the legend may be the truth-that Grant Wood picked Dr. McKeeby as a model while McKeeby was filling Grant's tooth...
...sensitive about the painting; so was the whole state of Iowa, although both Dr. McKeeby and Iowa eventually got over that. Even so, in the early 1940s, a good deal of persuasion was required to get Nan Wood Graham and Dr. McKeeby to pose for a photograph with American Gothic in the background, the occasion being the first hanging of the painting at the Cedar Rapids Art Association (Grant had done virtually all of his good early work in or near Cedar Rapids). The persuasion of Dr. McKeeby, who died some years ago, entailed the efforts of a Cedar Rapids...
...quality of the Spanish character-which Michener sums up in one evocative word, duende, meaning "mysterious and ineffable charm." All the immemorial sights are here too: the revelry following the feria at Seville, the impact of the roomful of Velázquez paintings at the Prado, the soaring, glowing Gothic church at León, the splendor of the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, The Source, and Hawaii brought him deserved standing as a competent if often heavy-footed popular novelist. His Iberia proves him a better Baedeker...
...slow in coming. Two decades ago, Art Historian Nikolaus Pevsner, in his Pioneers of Modern Design, relegated Gaudi to two footnotes in the appendix. Eight years later, Pevsner recanted, saying, "He is the only genius produced by art-nouveau." Gaudi, who urged that "we must not imitate or reproduce Gothic but continue it," based his studies on Catalan architecture and plant forms in nature. The results, scholars now recognize, intuitively anticipated many of today's shell structures, including the asymmetric churches by Mexico's Félix Candela...
...best films, she for Cukor and Bogart for Hawks; Huston's reputation as a director grew deservedly tarnished, and the best of his later films (Moby Dick, The Misfits) were critical failures; only Agee, in writing The Night of the Hunter, managed to put on screen the American romance gothic that fascinated him. He died less than two years later...