Word: heroicize
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Partly because he worked from sketches, engravings or memories of sculpture, Reni's heroic male nudes -- the Samson Victorious, and the various figures of Hercules done for the Gonzaga in Mantua -- have a sculptural intensity that blots out the rest of the painting. Background figures scurry about in deep recession, half transparent, like wraiths out of Tintoretto; the landscape is simplified into broad plains; against this, the single magnified body rises up. One remembers only the imposing structure turning, as it were, before the eye, displaying its stresses and bulges -- straining for embodiment and yet defeating it with...
Benton left New York for good in 1935, returning to Missouri. By then the regionalist movement had formed around his "heroic" pastoral vision, and he felt obliged to repudiate the city, whose art world was, he announced, a veritable Sodom of fanatics like Stieglitz and "precious fairies" who "wear women's underwear." Yet an odd thing about regionalism, as Adams shows in amusing detail, is that it was the only art movement ever launched by a mass- circulation magazine. Regionalism's promoter was a small-time Kansas-born art dealer named Maynard Walker, who sensed that the resentments of America...
...over the ease with which they had capitulated to Bush's no-new-taxes pledge, something close to the Administration's defense-spending target and budget chief Richard Darman's strategy of forcing Congress to make the fiscally necessary but unpopular cuts in domestic programs. "This is not a heroic agreement," said House Speaker Jim Wright, putting it mildly. And Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell cautioned, "No one should be deluded into thinking that this is the end of a process...
...feeble draftsmanship in Clemente's washed-out frescoes should once have been applauded, or that the lurid bombast of even the better works of Cucchi, such as the droopy head that lies like a huge Dalinian watch along the cemetery roof in Stupid Picture, 1982, could have been thought heroic in scale. In fact, there is less scale in such work than brute size. To see what the scale of an image can mean in terms of real address to the eye, one must go a few rooms back and look, once more, at early De Chirico and Sironi...
...hagiographies and heroic tales, faith is tested by adversity. Wheelwright's challenge is vintage Irving, an event that is simultaneously horrifying and absurdly funny. It occurs during a Little League game in the summer of 1953 when Meany, in the lineup because his diminutive strike zone draws walks, swings away. He connects for a mighty foul ball that shoots toward the stands and fatally strikes Wheelwright's mother on the head. The game is suspended along with, it is hoped, the reader's disbelief...