Word: motif
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...probably best remembered for the photographs he took of his friends, including Joyce, Hemingway and Picasso. Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray (Abbeville; 348 pages; $55) reproduces these pictures, of course, but much else as well. Ray flourished in Paris during the 1920s and '30s as a painter and a maker of often whimsical objects, such as a flatiron with a row of tacks attached. Photography was almost an afterthought, a means of recording his sometimes perishable constructions. But Ray's camera also captured an era -- when art belonged to Dada -- that this book scrupulously assembles and preserves...
...sources. The themes of pastoral delight, installed in Venetian art by Giorgione (represented here with one rare, very rubbed drawing) and given monumental form by Titian, spread south and north through the influence of the Giorgionesque engravers Giulio and Domenico Campagnola. Watteau copies one Campagnola landscape; Rubens takes a motif from another, Rembrandt from a third. These hard, wiry- lined little engravings, with their slightly metallic nudes and sudden dark explosions of vegetation, are to the circulation of ideas about landscape what Marcantonio Raimondi's copies after Raphael are to the human figure: veritable talismans of influence...
According to Elkies, there is a similar simplicity in music. "Think of the simple opening--dum dum dum dum!--of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. In music you start out with a trivial motif and it turns into this beautiful, intricate composition," he says. "Again, it all stems from this small, very simple idea...
Revitalization is quickly becoming a motif of the modern American metropolis. City after city is trying to rejuvenate decayed downtown and waterfront areas. Skyscrapers rise like phoenixes where factories and tenement houses once stood. In Baltimore, a decrepit harborplace was turned into a yuppie shopping and eating complex in just a few years. New York's waterfront suffered a similar facelift with the creation of South Street Seaport, a shopping plaza akin to Faneuil Hall. And the trend has spread to East Cambridge...
...school do not accept Jesus as the Messiah, they do believe that the man from Galilee might well have seen himself in that light. In fact, a number of lesser religious figures of Jesus' era also believed this about themselves. As for Jesus' death, Flusser interprets it within a motif of martyrdom that stemmed from the Maccabees, rather than from the belief that the Crucifixion would take away the sins of the world. "I am sure," says Flusser, "that there were many Jews, when Jesus was crucified, who believed this innocent victim of Roman cruelty would stop the anger...