Word: illusionistic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...level, it is numbing. But it is bound to be the most popular. When Hanson's work was shown in Des Moines last winter, 98,000 people flooded through the turnstiles to see it. The reason is obvious enough. Everyone loves an illusion, and Hanson is an expert illusionist. His lifelike, life-size figures are cast in polyester resin and fiber glass painted to look like real skin, clothed in real garments and provided with genuine glass eyes. The craftsmanship is meticulous, not to say obsessive. It produces not images but model people-androids without the electronic guts. Each...
...member, Magician James ("The Amazing") Randi, has publicly duplicated Uri Geller's feats, such as key and spoon bending, without invoking paranormal forces. He has challenged the Israeli illusionist to submit to controlled tests of his powers, but Geller has not responded...
...brisk high tones. The brutally emphatic imagery was created with a disconcerting sweetness of touch. Skeleton Painter in His Atelier, 1896, typifies this: the surface is almost as pretty as a Bonnard (though not nearly so well painted), and the very fact that Ensor was not trying to use illusionist tricks to convince viewers of the skeleton's reality lends his image a paradoxical strength-that of the throwaway line. One of the most affecting paintings in this show, for the same reason, comes late in Ensor's career, 1915: a portrait of his mother's corpse...
...with a monstrously ugly Swiss sphinx named Leisl Vitzipiit-zli. The people are brilliant talkers, but when they natter on too long, the highly theatrical author causes a grotesque face to appear at a window, drops someone through a trap door or stages a preposterous recognition scene. A master illusionist himself, Davies well deserves a packed house when-on a bare stage, out of nowhere, in a puff of smoke-he materializes with his next book...
...visit to Broadway's Broadhurst Theater, where the 75-year-old American drama has been handsomely restored by England's Royal Shakespeare Company, proffers at least one clue to the enduring fascination of Sherlock Holmes. He has the mythic quality of a seer. He is a master illusionist of the mind, a cerebral magician. He simply does not belong in the ordinary annals of sleuthdom. Even such outstanding detectives as Nero Wolfe, Inspector Maigret and Philo Vance pile up and sift the facts. Holmes notes the evidence with something like X-ray vision and pulverizes it with weary...