Word: masterworks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first several decades of its existence, Union Station was a wonder, a glowing masterwork of civic architecture that the authorities maintained and everybody used. Its redemption today is salutary not just as an example of impeccable restoration but also as a reminder that in this age of retrenchment and diminished dreams, ambitious federal public works can still amount to something more than strategic-weapons systems and superhighways...
Thus it is with the gifted Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg. Images of corporal corruption -- of malefic birth and voracious organs -- stalk his They Came from Within, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome. Heads explode, and monsters issue from the wombs of women. In Cronenberg's masterwork, The Fly, one man wages a heroic, doomed struggle against physical and moral degeneration; his body has a twisted mind of its own. The catalog of punishments seems medieval -- Savonarola meets Bosch -- even as it taps baby boomers' fears of decaying vitality and eviscerated dreams. For Cronenberg the body is a haunted house whose...
...hottest bidding was for Line, a 1920 minimalist masterwork in black and white by Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956). It went for $567,000 to David Juda of London's Annely Juda Gallery, one of a growing number of Western dealers specializing in Russian art. Several other Rodchenko works drew high bids, including the cubist-inspired Composition, 1916. The second highest price of $ the sale, however, was fetched by a contemporary Soviet artist, Grisha Bruskin, 43, who has been harassed by the KGB for displaying his paintings to foreigners. An anonymous buyer paid $416,000 for his Fundamental Lexicon, a witty...
ALEXANDER ZEMLINSKY: THE MERMAID (London). Long lost, a brooding tone poem and a late Romantic masterwork...
...main reason for this odd and often frustrating approach probably lies in Miller's view of his masterwork, Death of a Salesman. Although what lingers with many spectators is the play's powerful naturalistic evocation of family mistrust and disappointment, Miller emphasizes its nonrealistic side, the scenes of recollection and hallucination taking place in the haunted mind of its title character. His goal when creating Salesman, he says, was to "cut through time like a knife through a layer cake or a road through a mountain revealing its geologic layers, and instead of one incident in one time-frame succeeding...