Word: nymph
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Arcadia was the humanist's Club Med. In it, nothing happens. Shepherds and nymphs, young soldiers and scholars, madonnas, saints and animals loll about in a state of pure being, with no future tense. Arcadia has ruins, sometimes quite grand ones -- as in Claude Lorrain's classical revisions of the pastoral landscape, here represented by the Landscape with Nymph and Satyr Dancing, 1641 -- but Roman architecture does not include a stern call to Roman virtue and gravity. Arcadia's weather is always equable, and its views intimate and mellow. Above all, its location is not too far out of town...
...drawn to the discreet presence, strung along the shores of the Mediterranean, of an elegiac classical past. The figures in Matisse's fauve landscapes at St.-Tropez -- amply represented in this show -- are Arcadians with spots. The pale recumbent nude among the columnar tree trunks in his Nymph in the Forest, 1935-42 or '43, harks directly back to Titian. The flute player in Henri Rousseau's The Happy Quartet, 1902, whose music is joined by the howling of a giant white poodle, is a reprise of innumerable earlier pastorals. Gauguin was partly a reprise of Watteau, each...
...paid to do such things right. The backdrops, though, were so bad as to draw attention to themselves. Nurse Dwyer's office is recognizable as an office only because there's a desk in the middle of the stage. Confusing matters is a backdrop showing a corseted, bare-buttocked nymph straddling a column surrounded by almost-recognizable office paraphernalia suspended...
Like an avalanche of Styrofoam and saccharin, the Great Human Interest Saga of Andrew Wyeth and Helga Testorf, the German nymph of Chadds Ford, Pa., came roaring down the narrow defiles of silly-season journalism and obliterated the meager factual content of the story. Here, one learned, was a treasure, a secret cache of hundreds of paintings and drawings of a mystery blond done between 1971 and 1985 by America's dynastic culture hero, unbeknown to his wife, never exhibited, possibly the record of a love affair, bought en bloc for millions by a neophyte collector...
...long sojourn underground, subsisting on sap in tree rootlets, the cicada nymph passes through five growth stages, or instars, each of which ends with the insect throwing off its carapace. About two months before it is ready to emerge, the nymph tunnels its way upward, lying at the surface and building a protective earthen turret if the ground is too damp. This final rest stop is truly character building: it apparently enables the insect to develop adult claws and flight muscles to help it cope with life aboveground. "Their bodies undergo a major transformation, especially of muscle structure," says Miller...