Word: melvillean
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...galvanic dance of fake-shadowed solids in the Cones and Pillars series of the '80s, from the decorative pastelly flatness of the late-'60s Protractors to the wave of polished aluminum, gray as sea fog, that swells across the wall of MOMA in a magnificent piece with the Melvillean title of Loomings, 1986, Stella wrings more pictorial feeling from abstract art than anyone else alive. His big paintings, when they come off, are almost unique in their confidence: they project a sense of grandeur rather than the usual American inflation of scale. They are also marked by their will...
...health and spirits were at a low ebb, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade is a series of vignettes illustrating the venality of human nature. Woven throughout is the ever changing persona of the Confidence Man, who assumes various guises on board a ship of fools called, with typical Melvillean irony, the Fidèle, as it journeys down the Mississippi one April Fools' Day. It is a rich, difficult and underrated work, but not one well disposed to operatic adaptation...
Most wait quietly, unsure of what to expect. Ginsberg is reading his epic poem of outrage and lament to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its publication. Media announcements have recalled the public theatrics of the poet, an ostentatious non-comformist, a self-described "Hebraic Melvillean bardic breath." He drew together the strident Beat Generation of the 1950s, led the flower children of the 1960s into Eastern religions, hymned the antinuclear movement of the 1970s. Throughout, he sustained his vernacular yet visionary voice-marked, said one admiring fellow poet, by a "note of hysteria that hit the taste of the young...