Word: halos
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Like her plots, Ivy Compton-Burnett's flat in London's solidly middle-class Kensington section has resisted change for nearly 40 years. The wispy author, who wears her hair in a halo, pitter-patters about in a set of high-ceilinged rooms in which the light seems to have died long ago. The drawing room is her workshop and, since she does not know how to handle what she calls with distaste "a typing machine," she writes in longhand at a heavily scrolled oak desk, flanked by the ornate and the austere. Gilt chairs and pedestals topped...
...merely an incompetent guerilla leader; though his executive abilities are questionable he works harder than almost any other chief of state in the world. Fidel Castro is not a god; Cuba's popular magazine, Bohemia, printed a sketch of him, brows furrowed, eyes cast upward, with a light halo about his curly locks, but in the story made a point of denying that he was a reincarnation of Jesus Christ...
...face in the portrait was clearly Fidel Castro's, but the pose was a new one. A halo circled the dark curls, the lips were parted as though in prayer, the eyes were cast to heaven, the brow furrowed under a burden of sorrows. Inevitably it called to mind the picture of Jesus Christ that hangs above the bed in all proper Latin American bedrooms. Just so that no one would miss the point, Cuba's weekly magazine Bohemia, where the picture appeared, added a block of explanatory text: "This is not the Fidel that the barbudos know...
...Bounty) Laughton last week, King Lear was an eye-rolling, tongue-lolling, hand-scrabbling, dirty old man. Above a billowing green gown that looked like a collapsed circus tent (but still could not hide the hefty Laughton paunch), the famed suet-pudding face was almost obscured by a wild halo of home-grown white whiskers and an unkempt shoulder-length mane of home-grown white hair. For the Bard's buffs, the sight and sound of Lear as a whimpering, elderly brat, a Captain Bligh without backbone, was something of a shock...
...complemented the collection's brilliance with a well-balanced, elegantly proportioned, and grandly spaced installation--which looks good from any spot. The 19th century gallery is particularly impressive with Van Gogh's Self Portrait, the primus inter pares of the lot. The brilliant lime-green brushwork which forms a halo around the artist's head is both economical and expressive and the demonic eyes with yellow pupils, the red defining lines of the nose and mouth, and the curious (and heavily painted) medallion all contribute to this great self-portrait's emotional intensity. My next favorite is Degas' La Chanteuse...