Word: motif
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...Home was a favorite motif, whether it was a photograph of Chief of Naval Operations Admiral David L. McDonald's official residence on Observatory Hill, or a black and white print of a watercolor featuring two oak trees, two girls and two dogs, of the Johnson place on Pennsylvania Avenue...
...motif of the show is the easy interplay between man and beast, myth and daily life. The winged bulls and lions on vases and breastplates represent totemic alliances by which ancient man sought to acquire the power of the strongest beasts to fend off the evil forces around him. But in their arresting regality, these beasts bear themselves like demigods, not mere-animals...
...flying saucer. Such disks jiggle at a fingertip touch, but may weigh as much as 13 Ibs.-as a thief discovered when he tried to whisk one away from the Chrysler Art Museum, only to have it drop with a clang. The second, also a space-age motif, resembles the hollow cone of a missile. Inside, visible from both ends, are two metallic spheres, one hanging down like a tiny bathysphere on its nylon thread, and by its magnet attracting the magnet in another sphere that levitates upward, tethered by a thread. Each open end of the sculpture gives...
...death-wish motif is not something infantile and slightly ridiculous. What other than the death of young lovers constitutes the theme of such literary works as Romeo and Juliet, Dumas' La Dame aux Camèlias, Maxwell Anderson's Winterset, and practically all of the most popular operas, notably Tristan und Isolde...
Backwards Latin. Rippling across the ivory everywhere are images that summarize early theology. The tusks lend the cross an undulating vitality, repeated in the budding motif of the Garden of Eden's Tree of Life, then supposed to be the material of the original cross of Calvary. Taking these themes, the cross dramatically telescopes time, showing Adam and Eve, the primordial parents of man, at the base of the cross as they are at last raised from the dead by the Crucifixion. They seem to emerge from their eons-long sleep in a mood of joyous bewilderment as they...