Word: kelemens
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...craftsmen of the baroque preferred a curve to a straight line and a contorted curve to a plain one. When the Spaniards brought baroque to the New World, it blossomed in fresh and wonderful variations. Pal Kelemen, Hungarian-born art historian, has spent nearly three years tracing baroque's high-spirited course through Latin America. In a handsome new book with a sky-high price, Baroque and Rococo in Latin America (Macmillan; $16.50), he gives a rich account in words and pictures of what...
Over & over, Kelemen found "a style more baroque in its daring than the baroque of Europe." The New World innovators: mainly Indians under the supervision of Spanish architects and churchmen. Working just for their keep, or less, the Indians adopted baroque as "their own exuberant language," brought to their craft a religious enthusiasm such as European builders had not had since the Middle Ages...
...their splendor, many of the buildings and details that caught Kelemen's eye were in a crumbling state. Even in a few years' time, "the volcano of Paricutin in Mexico . . . floods in Guatemala, seismic catastrophes in El Salvador and Ecuador, civil strife in Colombia and an earthquake in Cuzco have all taken a tragic toll." Worst of all, according to Kelemen: civil authorities who are letting local masterpieces deteriorate through neglect-or are tearing them down to make way for widened streets and modern buildings...
Many of Mikofalva's peasants were bewildered. Janos Kelemen, the local president of the Communist-run Peasant Party, to whom Hungary's postwar land reform had given two holds (2.84 acres) in addition to the three he had owned before, said humbly: "I am a stupid peasant. How should I know whether Mindszenty is guilty or not? They tell me in one paper one way, and then comes my friend and tells me these are just lies...
What worries Kelemen more than Mindszenty's guilt is the fear that the Communists will take his land and make it part of a kolkhoz (collective farm). He is not sure what a kolkhoz is, but, he said: "Whatever it is, it is nobody's business to tell me what to do with my land. I know best how the manure should be placed on a wheat field on a sloping hill. And I don't want my neighbor's plow to touch my soil. What's mine is mine, and no one can take...
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