Word: harems
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...color scheme. Simplicity was not an effect sought or achieved by the imperial architect Sinan, who designed the magnificent 16th century doors on display. Fashioned from walnut and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, tortoiseshell, ebony and ivory, these were made for Sultan Murad III's pavilion in the harem area of the Topkapi Palace. A synthesis of art and architecture dates to the Timurid-Turkmen period (1370-1506). Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane, came from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, and went on to conquer near Eastern and Central Asian areas. The earliest known architectural scroll from the period "reflects...
...brings together such works as Ingres' Portrait of Madame Rivière and its almost mirror image in Picasso's Olga in an Armchair. Ingres' masterpiece The Turkish Bath was one of Picasso's icons, and bits of it recur constantly in Picasso's work - in the 1906 The Harem, 1918's The Bathers, in jokey etchings of 1968-71. In 1968, Picasso also did a series of erotic and scatological etchings based on Ingres' classic painting of Raphael and La Fornarina - taking the bad-boy rebel's backhanded artistic homage back a third generation to the Renaissance master they...
...pictures in The Unforgettable Maharajas are accompanied by a commentary that delightfully lists the royals' idiosyncrasies. The King of Jodhpur had to be called "Father" by all his subjects, including his mother. The ruler of Alwar preferred the title "God." A well-stocked harem was a vital component of many a maharaja's ego, but the considerate treatment of women was not always a high priority. When he abandoned his kingdom, the nawab of Junagadh, a great fan of hunting dogs, "left many weeping wives behind so that his pampered canines could fly with him on his plane." Despite their...
...them. Matisse took pains to project the image of an imperturbable bourgeois, but the realities of his life were more complicated. In a mid-life crisis solved the French way, he left his wife and family in Paris in 1917 for a new life in Nice with a personal harem of models. But Matisse dreaded the anarchic power of his desires. His sunlit rooms and elastic nudes are a bulwark against his fears of love and death. No less than Picasso, he made the canvas a defensive perimeter. His genius was to trim the battlements in the camouflage of paradise...
...among many nostalgia-oriented television shows. There were reunions of The Cosby Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H and numerous others (for God's sake, even Alf made a comeback, if only in commercials). But if The Bachelor was retro--even Paleolithic--in its harem-style courtship setup, that's not the same as saying it was nostalgic. Rather, it was an example of the ambivalence underlying most of today's so-called nostalgia: the past is a nice place to visit, but we don't really want to live there...