Word: muchness
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...painting a wall or a shadow? Actually, it's the central mullion of a window and its shadow, widened and dislocated by perception and imagination. Planes of pure color pressed tight against the surface of the picture, those passages of black, white and blue don't so much depict light and shadow as conduct their essences into the canvas. At the same time, they act as compositional load bearers, structuring the picture into geometric zones that frame the fish bowl, the highly abstracted orange fish and, to the right, the painter's white palette with his thumb stuck through...
These are the pictures that open the Chicago show, curated expertly by Stephanie D'Alessandro of the Art Institute and John Elderfield of MOMA. They represent a final prelude to the leap Matisse would make around 1913 into radical distortion and near abstraction. Much of that work he would do in the shadow of World War I. Rejected for service - he was 44 when the war began - he went on working in a Paris studio, while outside his door Europe hammered itself to pieces. Not long after, his hometown in northern France was occupied by German troops, his mother left...
...Matisse relocated to Nice, in the south of France, and in much of his work over the next three decades he would return - you might say retreat - to more conventional renderings of space and form. Decades passed before other artists began to draw out the full implications of his fertile experiments. Color-field paintings, for example - the big monochrome wafers of Ellsworth Kelly, the gossamer pools of pigment in Helen Frankenthaler - would emerge directly from Matisse, but not until the 1950s. Maybe we didn't understand him too quickly after...
...name for the story of Barack Obama's arc from youthful ambivalence to adult ambition, his struggle to reconcile his biracial roots and his attempt to build a political identity based on consensus rather than insistence. Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, has written an expansive work, as much an account of the forces that forged Obama's identity and intellect as it is a presidential biography. Though the level of detail can overwhelm at points, Remnick's fluid prose keeps the narrative on track. The book is well reported--featuring a host of anecdotes from intimates who ducked...
...much speed does it take to inspire such fervor? The broadband network that Google is offering may cost as much as $1 billion to build and will be able to transmit 1 gigabit per second. That's fast enough to download a feature-length DVD movie in about 70 seconds - and more than 100 times as fast as the typical connection available in the U.S., which ranks 22nd in the world in network speed, according to Akamai, an Internet-analytics firm. The Google guys are doing this to help spur the U.S. to overtake Romania and other...