Word: medusa
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...enough to send Dr. Heil back to Manhattan for another close-up inspection. With mounting excitement he dated the marble, through ultraviolet examination, as from the 16th century. The workmanship, he found, was Renaissance in character. A few details-unsmoothed caliper marks on the cheeks, one wing of the Medusa head on Cosimo's armor -seemed unfinished. Otherwise the statue was in near-perfect condition...
...bestselling fiction; but where the sexy bestsellers talk about the sordid or tragic facts of life in staccato sociology, couch jargon or four-letter words, Lolita is the more shocking because it is both intensely lyrical and wildly funny. It is (in many of its pages) a Medusa's head with trick paper snakes, and its punning comedy as well as its dark poetics will disappoint the smut hounds-a solemn breed...
With a heroine as unlikely and unlovely as Medusa, Novelist Taylor (A Wreath of Roses-TIME, March 21, 1949) has magically managed to write a brilliant and extremely funny book. At the end of a long life, the pride and pretense that made Angel unbearable in success make her magnificent in failure. Her outrageous behavior is somehow transmuted into tenderness. Ill and dying, she has a moment of believing that she is a child again, back in her mother's tiny grocery shop near the brewery, with factory sirens about to shred the morning air, and all of life...
Copley had invented Romantic horror-painting, but he never followed up his invention. That remained for Frenchman Theodore Gericault, whose Raft of the Medusa (see color) came 40 years later. Critics have made much of what Gericault owed to Michelangelo and Caravaggio, have tended to overlook his connection with Copley. Yet the similarity of composition (a pyramid tilted toward the horizon) and especially of spirit argues for Gericault's having known Copley's picture. Splendid though they are. both Copley's and Gericault's men-against-the-sea-scapes seem as dated today as they once...
...watercolors are on the whole less inspired, with the exception of Katherine Compton's bold, stylized head "Medusa" and Margaret Philbrick's "Willard Brook." Charles Demetropoulos demonstrates his usual skill in the treatment of reflections; a very wet wash catches the slick rain-swept pavement outside the "Museum of Fine Arts." Unfortunately he is not so meticulous in the overall composition...