Word: mediterranean
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...team put off seeking consensus on such volatile issues as costs and set about gathering evidence first. It designed and helped fund a regional pollution monitoring system that included 84 laboratories to document conditions in the waters. The labs turned up some hopeful signs: the absorption capacity of the Mediterranean proved to be greater than many experts had imagined, and pollution levels were not uniformly critical. Concluded Stjepan Keckes, the Yugoslav marine scientist who headed the U.N. team: "The Mediterranean is sick, but it is not dead and it is not even dying...
...resorted to it at some of his intense moments?not only the death of Casagemas, but in the construction of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (which began as an allegory of venereal disease, a subject of great interest to the energetic Pablo), of Guernica, and on into his "Mediterranean" subjects of the 1930s, with their bulls and horses, virgins and Minotaurs, caves, ruins and nymphs. Allegory was the conscious, intelligible form of Picasso's vast instinctive talent for metamorphosis, whereby a single form could harbor two or more literal meanings: a glass of absinthe including a drunkard's head, a guitar...
...work, and offered nothing that even Picasso's egotism could interpret as competition. She became an oasis of sexual comfort. His images of Marie-Thérèse reading, sleeping, contemplating her face in a mirror or posing (in the Vollard suite of etchings) for the Mediterranean artist-god, Picasso himself, have an extraordinarily inward quality, vegetative and abandoned. In one sense, the body of Marie-Thérèse, curled up in Nude Asleep in a Landscape, 1934, is seen as a graffitist might see it?a lilac-toned pink blob, twisted and curled to show its openings, nipples and navel...
...gratified desire." The climate of sexual politics has changed so irreversibly in the past 50 years that one cannot imagine a painter trying such images today. In that sense, Picasso closed another tradition in the act of reinventing it. The same applies to his visions of the classical Mediterranean from the 1930s. Picasso felt the Greeks in the ground and was the last modern artist to raise them...
...conventional decor of antiquity. They are more like emblems of autobiography, acts of passionate self-identification. Picasso's Minotaur, now young and self-regarding, fresh as a Narcissus with horns, now bowed under the bison-like weight of his own grizzled head, is Picasso himself. His Mediterranean images are the last appearance, in serious art, of the symbols of that once Arcadian coast...