Word: mask
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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COMEDY IN MUSIC. That matchless mirthmaster of the keyboard, Victor Borge, riffles through gags and slides off the piano bench without altering his usual mask of dismay and disdain. Added notes, comic and musical, are provided by Straight Man Leonid Hambro...
...face is a pliant mask of dismay and disdain. One never knows whether he regards his props-the microphone, the piano, the piano bench-as allies or enemies. Flailing away at Rachmaninoff, he skids clean off the piano bench, pulls out a neon-blue seat belt, fastens it with frosty dignity, and resumes his musical flight. He also keeps up a running gag with a treacherous watch that tells the day, month, year and altitude ("Today it is the 39th of February, 1216 B.C., and we are flying at an altitude of four feet below sea level...
...mouth, the twisted lips and the lines in the forehead leading down past the nose--express a sensitive adolescent's wild and frustrated response to a confusing world. But the eyes are open and alert, as if Beckmann is seeing himself apart from himself, viewing his face as a mask. He captures a vision of himself, not "through a glass darkly, but face to face, even as he is seen." Beckmann makes visible and concrete, his clusive identity, his inner self: "If you wish to get hold of the invisible, you must penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible...
...again holds a cigarette, his hand set in a masculine gesture powerfully contrasted with that of the young aesthete. The viewer's attention oscillates between the hand and face, but here the face is full and sculptured. The head is patterned with darkness--the strange lighting gives it a mask-like quality--but light is shining on him obliquely, illuminating his side, giving a hnt of underlying self-awareness. This portrait haunts the entire show like a spectre, standing over the work of a life-time as the finest embodiment of Beckmann's genius...
ABSENCE OF A CELLO. This amusing farce breezes along on the proposition that the corporate image is a fright mask...