Word: mordantly
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Laurie Colwin is a writer in love with writing about love. After six books, including her delicate little lyric of a novel, Happy All the Time, she remains as exclusive to her theme as a troubadour and as mordant as a jester...
With O'Keeffe, vision preceded style, and her works escape the provincial air that clings to some early American modernism ("Colonial Cubism," in Stuart Davis' mordant phrase). Her main stylistic affinities are less with other American or European painting than with photography: the work of Stieglitz, but especially of her friends Paul Strand and Edward Weston, obsessed with sharp focus, clear emblematic shapes of stone, bone and weathered root, the far telescoped into the near. Her America was a more stripped, fundamental and varied place than anything one can find in "regional" painting of the '30s. She made indelible images...
This layer of society is relatively new to Avedon's camera, which is more commonly trained upon Nastassja Kinski's pout and Brooke Shields' rump. He has spent more than three decades at the pinnacle of fashion photography. But at the same time, he has perfected a mordant style of portraiture that mocks the earthly vanity his fashion shots glorify. The fixtures of that style are familiar: unsmiling figures shot in sharp focus against a plain white background. (Avedon started his career taking identity-card shots for the Merchant Marine.) The results can be pitiless. With every wrinkle...
...futile, however: his desire for incorporeality, that the "artist must manage to make believe that he never existed," is never quite achieved in any of his fiction and completely betrayed by his published correspondence. Flaubert's letters, in which profound statements on art and deeply personal confessions coexist with mordant wit and bloodcurdling obscenity, constitute as full a self-portrait of the artist as we are likely to get from any writer...
...last place in the ratings seemed depressingly unshakable. Some of the network's hit shows of the late 1960s and early '70s were often faddish entries, quick to catch on and quick to fade away: Batman, The Mod Squad, Kung Fu. ABC's ratings woes became the subject of mordant jokes. Asked how to end the Viet Nam War, industry wags would reply, "Turn it into an ABC series and it will be canceled in 13 weeks...