Word: millennium
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...exact spot where an artificial tulip stood in his Paris studio (painted white, leaves and all, so as not to offend his eye with the detestable color green). Like Kandinsky, the other fa ther figure of abstract painting, he was a Theosophist: a man given to dreams of the millennium, when material reality would wither away and leave an ideal domain of the pure spirit. Art would help in this great, vague process. Though words were hard to sunder from the sublunary mire of things, art could become intrinsically abstract, as pure an example of internal harmony as music...
...through some of the worst catastrophes of European history without doubting the Theosophical fairy tale for a moment. No doubt he saw the wars and coups and mass murders of his age as signs that he was right after all - as preludes to the end of history itself, the millennium. What distinguished him from other mystagogic nuts, however, was his talent as an artist. On the evidence of this show, he was far and away the most gifted painter of his generation in prewar Munich. Even his student drawings of the nude have a wiry and controlled strength in their...
...People's Republic of China took a flier in the "export of revolution" during the '60s and '70s, when the Peking leadership was still enamored of Mao's idea that global disorder would hasten the Communist millennium. The results ranged from disappointing in Africa to disastrous in Indonesia, where a Peking-sponsored coup d'état backfired, leading to the destruction of the local Communist Party and official hostility toward China that lingers to this day. Partly because of that experience, partly because of their disillusionment with Mao's constant reinterpretation of Marxism...
Lenin regarded all that as foolish, but not terribly inconvenient. He paid a certain amount of lip service to the Marxist prophecy, while in his policies he set about battening down the here and now of socialism and deferring forever the promised millennium of true Communism. The last thing he wanted, or would tolerate, was any move that would cause the state to wither or that would mitigate the dictatorship of the Communist Party...
...Tell Mardikh strata reveal that Ebla reached its zenith in the middle of the 3rd millennium, around 2300 B.C. It reigned over a vast network of trade routes, lending business expertise to cities hundreds of miles away. A century later it had apparently fallen, its coffers plundered and its walls razed by rivals to the south...