Word: motif
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...nearly blind, and as close to being a national hero as any French artist has ever been in his own lifetime-eventually died, the garden had become one of the most complete environmental expressions of a man's taste ever to be constructed. Monet created his own motif in order to paint it in tranquillity, and the paintings were art about art-self-reflexive, but imbued with an intense veneration for nature...
...sumptuous show titled "Monet's Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism." It contains 81 paintings-a third of them lent by the Musée Marmottan in Paris, all of them images from the garden. We see, lined up, the different versions of each motif that Monet so obsessively worked at, in every possible variation of light, laboring to divide nuances into further nuances and stabilize their intervals with the devotion of a particle physicist: the poplars, the haystacks, the rose-twined tunnel of the arbor leading to his house, the water. To reproduce their subtleties is impossible; to recollect...
...choreographers to hide behind the trappings of the art, because dance itself is so difficult to construct well. As "pure dance," only one of last weekend's offerings was wholly successful. Howard Fine's "Dream Journal," the opening work on the program, unfolded a beautifully organic pattern on the motif of the softly curving arc. Dancers tumbled their arms like water-wheels in the fall of the current, or turned on one leg, the others bent at right angles the way a feather spirals in a funnel of air. All the edges here had been washed smooth, and the rhythmic...
...Renaissance maxim ran: every painter paints himself. Steinberg's peculiar achievement has been to render this maxim, pruned of all expressionist content. What obsessively concerns him is the idea that each drawing remakes its author: it is a mask. The self-made artist is one of his favorite motifs, and certainly his most famous one: a little man grasping the pen that draws him. In this "self-portrait," artist and motif are fused, locked in a permanent logical impossibility that is also an ambition of poetry: Myself I will remake...
...movie is credible. Dip beneath the plot and you arrive at a psychological sewer. Among several gratuitous shock tactics, Toback treats the audience to an on-screen prostate examination and the spectacle of two women's heads being smashed together. The film's most persistent Freudian motif is a phallus fixation that borders on the pathological. Though Toback tries hard to emulate the expressionistic style of Director Martin Scorsese, Fingers never amounts to more than a flamboyantly neurotic drive-in movie...