Word: life
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...life-size," Whistler once said-and fewer still combine the gall, gallantry and genius with which Whistler fashioned a larger-than-life legend. Poet and Critic Horace (Amy Lowell) Gregory skirts the legend, feeling that many of the stories are in their anecdotage. He sacrifices color for perspective, but even a toned-down Whistler is no still life...
West Point Esthete. "I do not choose to be born at Lowell," said Massachusetts' James Whistler in later life, but he was, on July 10, 1834. The boy's father, a West Point engineer, shortly obliged him with a surrogate birthplace (St. Petersburg) by accepting Czar Nicholas I's commission to build a Moscow-to-St. Petersburg railroad. When the elder Whistler died in a cholera epidemic, James was old enough to enter West Point. In a chemistry exam, Cadet Whistler identified silicon as a gas, and West Point decided to do without him. "If silicon...
...Japanese and Chinese techniques, and as the experimental godfather of modern nonobjective painting. Less debatably, Author Gregory ranks Whistler as a culture hero who refused to play drawing-room jester to Victorian philistines and who always regarded art as a basic necessity, not a superficial luxury of civilized life...
Forest Lawn is a cemetery in which nobody calls a spade a spade. Here the loss of life is known as "leavetaking," a corpse is "the loved one" or "the revered clay," the dead are merely "out of sight." Here 1,500,000 visitors a year wander, secure in the knowledge that they can avoid seeing a tombstone; graves, marked only with bronze plaques set level with the ground, are clustered in such consoling sites as Sunrise Slope, Slumberland, Resthaven, Sweet Memories, Everlasting Love. Infants are buried in Babyland, which is "shaped like a mother's heart," and Lullabyland...
...depressing patches of devil grass, straggling untidy pepper trees [and] grim granite headstones," he was seized with a thrilling vision of "a great park, devoid of [the] customary signs of earthly death," where the dead might, in the biographer's prose, have "a beautiful passage to eternal life," a place, said Eaton, "where lovers new and old shall love to stroll and watch the sunset glow...