Word: mosaic
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...while his work was influenced deeply by the French impressionists, and by the patterned, mosaic-like paintings of Gustav Klimt, then the dean of Austrian art. Gradually Schiele evolved a somber style of his own-and he had few inhibitions about his subject matter. His pictures were roundly denounced as "the most disgusting things one has ever seen in Vienna." He himself was once convicted of painting erotica and jailed for 24 days-the first three of which he spent desperately trying to make paintings on the wall with his own spittle. For years he wore hand-me-down suits...
Among the Romans, where power was frequently the only truth, superficial appearance was reality. Christianity restored the art of transcendent hidden meanings. With impressive erudition, Malraux traces the sacerdotal role of cathedral, mosaic and icon and the evolution of Christian art from the austere, stylized Byzantine Pantocrators to the benign, handsome "Beau Dieu" in the central portal of Amiens Cathedral. Despite the growing intrusion of realistic detail, Giotto, as late as the 14th century, "did not copy the sky men see, but transmuted it into a sky charged with Christ's presence." But a century later Botticelli plunged into...
...literacy rate of only about 15%, the country prints 20 daily newspapers and 36 weeklies, with a circulation approaching 755,000. Copies of the leading dailies, going out by motor lorry and dugout canoe, eventually reach even the remotest regions-a much-needed unifying influence on Nigeria's mosaic of 250 tribes. And by being free itself, under the long years of benevolent British tutelage, the nation's press has taught Nigerians valuable first lessons in the meaning and the duties of freedom...
Within this philosophy of the function of art. B.B. proved himself extraordinarily receptive to works other than those of the Italian Renaissance. Classic architecture, both Greek and Roman, Byzantine mosaic and Medieval sculpture all provide him with "life-enhancing" works, works which he could return again and agin--with, it seems, unending pleasure...
Skillfully skirting the borders of fee-fi-fo-flummery, FitzGibbon evokes both moral disintegration and mortal blow with a chilling casualness that sometimes has the ring of day-after-tomorrow's newspaper. To achieve his grisly effect, he painstakingly puts together a mosaic of slight things that seem to have gone wrong in the commonplace of today-the "crack in the teacup [that] opens a lane to the land of the dead...