Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even in a campaign year-or especially in a campaign year-such rhetoric is difficult to excuse. It rests, to start with, on an inflammatory imprecision, the polemics of overkill. Hitler's holocaust remains the century's central metaphor of evil. Throughout the '60s, by a process of escalating outrage, the device debased what was left of political dialogue. Radicals painted "Amerika" on campus walls. Police were "fascist pigs." Women's Lib's Gloria Steinem even took up the cry recently, claiming that a female reading Playboy must experience the same revulsion that...
...clarity, that they loved individual phrases to the detriment of the overall design--the forest-trees syndrome. The late George Szell, when asked why his interpretations of the classical repertoire could not be warmer in tone, gave a gourmet's response: "I cannot pour chocolate sauce over asparagus." The metaphor, though exaggerated, describes to some degree what happened in the first half of Monday's concert--thick, sensuous topping (quite enjoyable in the proper context) amorphously coating the crisp organic forms of Haydn and Beethoven. I hasten, however, to make it perfectly clear that the group's well-intended savoring...
...political parable of contemporary life in Brazil: the hero's family, with members of all colors, represents the interrelation of Brazil's races; the people he encounters--police, gangsters, politicians, poor, rich--represent various sectors of society; and, most important of all, the recurring theme of cannibalism is a metaphor for the way in which Brazilian society is consuming itself. "Those who can," says de Andrade, "eat others through their consumption of products, or even more directly as in sexual relationships." That's as may be, but on the evidence of this film one could not form a very clear...
...candle flame, streaming upward from its stubby pillar of wax, was one of the favorite images in 17th century European art. Vulnerable to a breath, shedding its modest light and resolving the threats of darkness into rational form, it became a metaphor of human consciousness itself. Indeed, a tradition of the "night piece" runs back to the late 15th century, when Leonardo set down his precepts for painting dramatic firelit groups. Rembrandt in Holland and Caravaggio in Rome produced unforgettable examples of the genre. But the artist whose work is most intimately associated with candlelight was Frenchman: Georges...
...pediment, are quite unclassical despite their constant references to antiquity. The surfaces of trunk and limb are gouged, broken and battered: the act of painting the human image becomes an assault. Rhetorical defects plague his work. But its aim-which is to use the human figure as a unique metaphor for a sense of crisis and cultural exhaustion-is large; and at their best, as in Burnt Man IV, 1961, Golub's stiff monsters become monuments of scar tissue, celebrating man's minimal function: to survive...