Word: knew
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Half a century after his death, most of us know little of Gandhi's real history or how the Mahatma in our minds came to be. Hundreds of biographies uncritically canonize him. Winston Churchill scorned him as a half-naked fakir stirring up sedition. His generation knew him as a radical political agitator; ours shrugs off a holy man with romantic notions of a pure, pre-industrial life. There is no either-or. The saint and the politician inhabited the same slender frame, each nourishing the other. His struggle for a nation's rights was one and the same with...
...Matisse paints The Red Studio, "discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color," as his biographer Hilary Spurling puts it. Already burdened by the Fauve ("wild beast") misnomer, his public saw his work as a threat "to undermine civilization as they knew it." At virtually the same moment, his great rival Picasso creates his equally masterly Cubist collage Still-Life with Chair Caning and Guitar, which reverses the centuries-old traditions of sculpture, focusing the spectator's eye not on the final effect but on the process and materials by which it is obtained...
...yourself back to a time before true mirrors. In Europe the art of painting had been lost to the ruthless destruction of barbarians. No Western man could see a real likeness of humankind upon a wall because no artist knew how to draw one. The pictures that adorned medieval churches--there was no secular painting--eschewed reality for decoration or dogma. Gilt-bedizened Madonnas with flat, staring eyes holding outsize infant Christs bespoke not man but the supernatural mystery of the faith...
...revelation, at least to Western eyes: multiple copies of an entire volume produced by mechanical means. True, printing from movable type had been performed in Asia, but thousands of ideograms made the widespread use of the technique impractical. Gutenberg, who apparently knew nothing of the Asian innovations, was blessed not only with an inventive mind but also with a phonetic alphabet and its manageable cast of characters. Movable type was set to change the world...
...exploration, Marxist utopias). If religion taught faith and the mystery of the Causeless Cause (the ultimate secret, God), Newtonism located human intelligence in a cosmos of magnificently impassive reciprocities, celestial mechanics working by God's infinitely reliable and predictable cause and effect. Perhaps Newton merely codified what we intuitively knew (equal and opposite reactions, for example). As Einstein said, "The conceptions which he used to reduce the material of experience to order seemed to flow spontaneously from experience itself, from the beautiful experiments which he ranged in order like playthings...