Word: mask
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Carré's astringent, melancholy tones will be familiar to anyone who has read his works or those of such eminences as Eric Ambler (The Mask of Dimitrios) and Graham Greene (The Third Man). Still, Ambler's works are written from the outside with sardonic imagination. Greene's achieve more intimacy, but he is careful to label them as mere "entertainments," like a student caught doodling when he should be cramming for exams. Le Carré carries no such liabilities or self-deprecations. His books are written from the inside out. "There is a kind of fatigue which only fieldmen know" observes...
This capacity for empathy with his subject and--more of a challenge--the artist's skill at bringing his audience to a like understanding has its roots in the animism of the earliest primitive artists: French cave-mural painters, mask-fashioners of Africa and Eskimo sculptors. The belief that a spirit exists in every living thing implies that in order to fashion an image one must first understand exactly what sort of spirit moves the subject. By the same token, art initially served a practical function: it was believed that by symbolically capturing prey (one captured a portion...
...condemned for its unfeeling and--in Gallagher's case, possibly vindictive--treatment of its workers. It is unfortunate that in offering these workers undesirable jobs, and in trying to circumvent a statute that would support the employees the University has seen fit to hide behind legal technicalities that thinly mask a cold, calculated attempt to cut back on labor costs...
...preoccupation with social criticism. Grosz, for example, never could have believed, as Kirchner did, that "an artist's drawings will never be superfluous since they have that which is the essence of art--beauty beyond purpose or morality." Drawings such as Grosz's Christ with a Gas Mask (1928), or The Gratitude of the Fatherland (1920) are both purposeful and moralistic. Grosz even used the codified morality of Christian iconography and symbolism to dramatize his message, as in Christ with a Gas Mask. More often the religious connotations of his art are more subtle--The Gratitude of the Fatherland, with...
...Rumanian-born Serban, who has become the latest fad hero of the self-styled experimentalists, the text is simply a mask that must be ripped off to reveal the unconscious, irrational blood flow of the play. The dramatist is presumed unable to capture the Id of his work in words, so the director imposes a distracting new subtext that blurs, blots out or mangles the real text. In The Cherry Orchard, earlier this season, Serban altered the living space of Chekhov's drama to a kind of surrealistic all-white silo in which Mme. Ranevskaya ricocheted around without...