Word: mallarme
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...memory was as short as the walk from the pond to the studio. In his genius for rendering evanescence within a monumental structure, Monet became a master of le temps retrouvé: the most Proustian of painters. His truer literary equivalent, though, was the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. The blank page, for Mallarmé, trembled with possibility, as calm water or the tight-stretched canvas did for Monet. Its white flatness was not an absence: it was a poetic element, possessing the character of thought. "The intellectual armature of the poem," Mallarmé once wrote, "conceals itself...
...blue that I might call mine," says Motherwell, "it is simply a blue that feels warm, something that cannot be accounted for chemically or technically but only as a state of mind." This blue has literary prototypes, embedded in Motherwell's reading of French verse. It is Mallarmé's azur, the color of oceanic satisfaction. It is the hue of Baudelaire's sea, the color of escape. But it is also pure ideated feeling. One cannot say that a painting like Summer Open, with Mediterranean Blue, 1974, with its softly respirant field of ultramarine, "depicts...
...very much part of the history of surrealism. It grows from the same stem: a fascination with dreams, nuances, fugitive image-clusters, arcane fragments of memory and culture-an outgrowth of romanticism that, by the end of the 19th century, had accumulated a formidable literature. Cornell, who worshiped Mallarmé for his exactitude of feeling, was the last symbolist poet-a pretty symmetry, for the symbolists were much inspired by another American, Edgar Allan...
...trampled on, noted Spanish Philosopher Ortega y Gasset, 40 years ago, is the right to continuity. It is that essential link with the past that Bell is intent on reforging. Others are entering similar pleas, but Bell's seems the most brilliantly argued. Moving fluently from Marx to Mallarmé to Andy Warhol, he makes use of modernists' own arguments to reject their conclusions. His adversaries should have no trouble understanding him and perhaps heeding him. Bell's book is the year's most promising start on the long road back to civitas...
...Baltimore, there was even more melancholy vandalism. Upon a recent midnight dreary, someone entered the Westminster Presbyterian Church graveyard and pried an 18-in. circular bronze medallion sculpture of Edgar Allan Poe's head from the shaft marking his grave. Stéphane Mallarmé was being too optimistic when he wrote The Tomb of Edgar Poe: "Let this granite at least forever be a boundary/To the foul flights of scattered blasphemy in the future...