Word: legerity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...student in St. Petersburg up to 1910, he came under the wing of Diaghilev's designer Leon Bakst; an enlightened Jewish patron, Max Vinaver, sent him to Paris that year. He took a studio in a rickety building near the slaughteryards and found that his neighbors were Soutine, Leger and Modigliani. Back in Russia by 1914, Chagall waited out World War I (and was plunged into the Revolution) in the company of Tatlin, Malevich and Kandinsky...
...Industrial Revolution, Lewis argued, the English should be peculiarly fitted to make art of it: "They are the inventors of this bareness and hardness, and should be the great enemies of Romance." The pleated, diagonally stressed, armored precision of Lewis' paintings, as grand in their own way as Fernand Leger's, testifies to this -- in A Battery Shelled, 1919, even the smoke is metal. "I look upon Nature, while I live in a steel city," exclaimed David Bomberg in 1914, and the terse machine-like signs he found for briskly moving figures in The Mud Bath, his early masterpiece...
Klein came to photography by way of painting, having studied briefly with Fernand Leger. Once he turned to the camera, the former sociology major from New York's City College showed a deep instinct for the urban demotic, with its links to the police blotter, the tabloid and the B movie. With money earned by doing Vogue fashion spreads in France, he made a picture-taking trip to New York in 1954, equipped with both the expatriate's eye for its psychic stresses and the native's complicity in them. Without resorting to the bizarre, he got the profoundly unsettled...
Most of the blame for Haiti's economic straits can be placed directly on Duvalier. Finance Minister Marcel Leger disclosed earlier this month that the ex-President-for-Life had skimmed off $1 from the price of every sack of flour that was milled in Haiti. Annual average production amounted to 2.5 million sacks. The Duvalier family had also demanded a 50 cents "tithe" on every sack of cement that was sold. Managers of state monopolies in the sugar and cooking-oil industries have admitted to kicking back money over the years, resulting in higher prices for staple commodities...
Horses not only had ideal attributes in this scheme of things, they also made plausible heroes. The great example is Stubbs' prosaically titled Hambletonian, Rubbing Down, 1800. Hambletonian, winner of both the St. Leger and the Doncaster Gold Cup in 1796, belonged 3 to a rich and deep-gambling young baronet named Sir Henry Vane-Tempest. In 1799 Vane-Tempest put him up against Diamond, another star horse, for a purse of 3,000 guineas. (At the time, a farmer's laborer might have made the equivalent of five guineas a year.) The match drew the biggest crowd...