Word: motif
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SHATTERED illusions has become the motif of the month. The illusion that Blankie and I would be together forever--cruelly shattered. The illusion that my idyllic life as a sophomore would never end--destroyed...
...Genet in paint. So too with the "disasters" and the electric chairs of the early and mid-'60s, which are truly awful in their curt, grainy enunciation of the facts of casual or ceremonial death. The sign on the wall of the death chamber -- SILENCE -- provides an essential motif of Warhol's imagination, and it was hardly an accident of gesture that his best-known self-portrait has his finger on his lips...
...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...