Word: magie
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Going the Three Wise Men 13 better, a Houston department store this Christmas is offering the services of 16 mail-order magi for a total cost of $825,000-which tots up to a lot of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Called The Ultimate Gift of Knowledge, a newly published catalogue from the Sakowitz company includes a choice of lessons from top pros in just about every sport or hobby the loved one may want to learn -from skiing to swimming, bronc busting to piano playing. Prudently, perhaps, the company does not offer courses in poetry, philosophy, painting or other such...
...book progresses, the style improves in direct proportion to the content. There are even flickers of ingenuity where Matthews weaves Eliotisms directly yet unobtrusively into the narrative--"Eliot's return to Harvard was (you may say) satisfactory." Lifting most of this line straight out of Journey Of the Magi, Matthews adopts a form of Eliot's own philosophy, that "immature poets borrow, mature poets steal...
...dazzling sumptuousness. The epitome of this was opus Anglicanum, or "English work," a taxingly intricate method of embroidery that flourished in London guild shops during the 13th and 14th centuries. The Met possesses one rare example, the so-called Chichester-Constable chasuble, whose scenes (like the Adoration of the Magi, opposite) are embroidered with dense, flat expanses of metal-covered thread. Tin, mined in Cornwall, was drawn to a fine ribbon, coated with gold, wound around the silk and then worked into the red velvet ground with a gold or silver needle; steel needles, as known today, were not used...
...pattern of stitches, which could never attain the fluidity of line and shading that paint or wash gave. Refined as it is, with its or nue or "shaded gold" method of gold thread couched with varicolored silks, a roundel like the 16th century Spanish Adoration of the Magi (based, probably, on an unidentified Renaissance painting) is almost too limited in technique for the painting style it simulated. But in flat pattern, Renaissance and later embroiderers could and did achieve magnificent results-sometimes lighthearted and almost naive, as in the wool stitching of flowers, fruits and leaves on a white linen...
Leaving the exhibition, one can't help but remember a kaleidoscope of images: Sassetta's Magi colorfully dotting a hill, the light passing through the stained-glass window of Vermeer's work, the strength of Picasso's Gertrude Stein, Rousseau's Tropics, with a monkey that looks like he's blowing bubbles with orange bubble gum, or Pollock's Autumn Rhythm defying the limits of its canvas. As if each color of Morris Louis' "unfurled" is a work from the show, one sees them falling off to the sides leaving a space of white light shining from the center...