Word: motif
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...Ambiance, as Nicole Alphand uses it, is the total atmosphere of a place, achieved by arranging everything around a central motif...
HUGO WEBER-Howard Wise, 50 West 57th St. Last year's show by the Swiss-born abstractionist had a rivers-of-the-world motif. Now Weber has turned to love; his titles contain the word over and over. The paintings could just as easily be about indigestion. Through...
...subjects are uneasily seated atop a dais, sprawled in frank nakedness on a couch, wrestling through homosexual positions on a podium. In last year's Three Studies for a Crucifixion, a motif he has been studying since 1931, Bacon painted a triptych more than 14 ft. wide with enigmatic figures and bony carcasses looming in red oval rooms. The central panel contains a kneaded corpse lying in bed amidst a welter of congealed gore. There is no more overt Christian symbolism than that every man can find himself martyred meaninglessly. And the source of Bacon's idea...
Musicians are a favorite motif. Her "Music Makers" shows a bald, pensive man resting his head on his hands and facing a woman, apparently depressed, who plays a flute. In the background, a girl with an expression of acute misery on her face plays another flute and a second girl stands with her hand covering her lower face. As in most of the paintings, reds and oranges abound and pale but acid greens and yellows dominate the faces. The group may very well be a family...
...Ensor said, and his etchings fire from every barrel, trying style after style even within a single year of production. His first plate was done in 1886, when he was only 26, and shows an amazing early technical mastery. By the end of that year, Ensor had ranged in motif from a fine-line portrait of the Swedish botanist Frise to a haggard, almost Hogarthian satire on historical painting in the grand manner, entitled Iston, Pouffamatus, Cracozie and Transmouff, Celebrated Persian Physicians, Examining the Stools of King Darius after the Battle of Arbela. In it, the learned doctors peer into...