Word: gothicisms
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...follow the work of Author Barry Hannah may feel a touch of déjà vu upon beginning his fifth book. The Tennis Handsome opens with two pieces from Airships (1978), Hannah's highly praised collection of short stories. The first, Return to Return, retells the gothic catastrophe of French Edward, a good-looking tennis pro who discovers his mother in bed with his supposedly homosexual coach, nearly drowns in the Mississippi River and is fished out with most of his mental capacities washed away. He lives on as an automaton who is still a terror...
...papal entourage came to a halt in front of St. John's Cathedral, a red-brick gothic church in the Old Town that has served as a rallying point for antigovernment demonstrators since the declaration of martial law. John Paul entered the church and descended to the underground crypt to pray in front of the tomb of the late Polish Primate Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, who died...
...retrospective of 84 drawings, prints and paintings opened last week at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, suffered both. There was a time when millions of Americans who would never have looked inside a museum knew, from reproduction, one painting of Wood's, American Gothic: he with the pitchfork and faded bibbed overalls, she of the dowdy mien and disapproving eye, in front of that white frame house. For the mass audience it was the most famous painting in the world. The runner-up was Leonardo's Last Supper; and after that, what...
...went to Europe in 1928 to study the Northern Renaissance portraits on which American Gothic is based, and to examine the work of Patinir and Bruegel, from which his aerial views of landscape were partly derived. He did not look at modern art when he was there, although there are some mild homages to it in his later work: the purposeful, bland, geometric rotundity of skirts and cows' backsides bears some likeness to the derivations from Léger one sees in the English vorticist William Roberts. His addiction was to the consoling udder, not the maddening verre...
...also see, as an unexpected bonus, what a good painting American Gothic was. Major clichés become invisible after a while, and Curator Corn has made a valiant effort to strip the accretions from this one. She has included a hilarious collection of cartoons and ads based on American Gothic-an inspired piece of contextual criticism. Far from being a lampoon of conservative Midwestern farmers and their wives, American Gothic is, as she points out, "not about farmers, not about a married couple, and not a satire." Thirty-two years' difference in age lay between its models, Wood...