Word: motifs
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Anyway, the motif of family values kept recurring along the Ik-Idaho Road. The Republicans conjured it up and turned it to powerful political effect. Their show in Houston was gaudy and complex -- a hellfire tent meeting dissolving to a '50s television sitcom with flags and confetti and sometimes tinny modulations...
Passionate and energetic by nature, Johnson felt most drawn to an Expressionist idiom. His particular heroes were Chaim Soutine (especially the convulsive Ceret landscapes) and, later, Oskar Kokoschka. At the outset, his homages to Soutine's surging hills and toppling houses had a somewhat illustrational tone -- painting from the motif, he sometimes used a distorting lens to produce the effect, as earlier landscapists had used a smoked Claude Lorraine glass -- so that the image turned out more optical than visceral. But as his sense of the relations between mark and motif increased, Johnson's landscapes accumulated power, and some...
Given the high finish of his marbles, the roughness of his terra-cotta models comes as a surprise. In the first heat of exploring a motif, Canova worked as quickly and directly, almost, as Rodin, squeezing and knifing the clay to slab out the shapes. On occasions, he could compress a remarkable charge of emotion into these little studies: in one of them, the curve of the long neck of Antigone weeping over her dead brothers has much the same shape and, in miniature, some of the same tragic force as the woman's head in Picasso's Guernica...
Ross Perot, the plutocrat populist poised for the presidency, holds court from the 17th floor of a North Dallas office tower -- a memorabilia-filled aerie (the artistic motif is Rockwell paintings and Frederic Remington sculptures, and Perot is happy to tell with a chuckle what he paid for almost everything) that radiates almost preternatural calm. His desk is clean, save for the week's schedule of media interviews and a list of Perot coordinators in all 50 states. But at a time when Bush and Clinton are racing around the country, giving speeches, honing positions, posing against scenic backdrops, this...
Americana: Harris' last meal was two large pizzas, a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a six-pack of Pepsi, a bag of jelly beans, a pack of Camel cigarettes. Junk food was a sort of surreal motif in the case. In 1978 Harris murdered two teenage boys in order to steal their car for a bank robbery, and, having killed them, he finished the burgers they had been eating. (My theory is that Harris would be alive today if he had not eaten the burgers. That detail must have struck the jurors as the cool, novelistic touch of Satan...