Word: oeil
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Stories: One of the landmark features of the hotel is The Oval Room. The Oval Room ceiling showcases a trompe l'oeil sky and cloud mural. According to hotel legend, John Singer Sargeant would lunch at the Oval Room while painting the Boston Public Library murals. Inspired by the grandeur that the room emanated, he joined the painters of the dining room's ceiling mural and added an angel. Unfortunately, 30 years later the hotel painted over the angel while remodeling. It is also rumored that Olympic gold medalist Sonia Henning, when visiting Boston, would often have the Oval Room...
...untitled work, the artists present a "trompe l'oeil" installation of workers' paraphernalia, recently abandoned for a coffee break. Rollers, paint buckets, empty cups and cigarettes inconspicuously occupy a seemingly unfinished corner of the exhibition. Yet on further examination we realize this is the exhibition and that the scattered objects are all carefully-crafted replicas of tools and trash. Any other artists couldn't get away with such preciousness, but we can't help but admire and buy into Fischli and Weiss' jokey yet obsessive conviction. Their installation of a museum installation turns a common '80s critique of display mechanics...
...evolution of the Kennedy myth after Dallas has set an American mood of moral disquiet and trompe l'oeil. Now you see it, now you don't. The shining story of Camelot has proceeded through the decades with an evil twin--the American tabloid version of the Kennedys, with Mafia molls and ruthless lusts and greeds: the gods as gangsters...
...Keeffe, and an Axel Kesselbohmer--show skulls. Not one seventeenth- or eighteenth- century painting shows any of the other symbols associated with passing time; after such a lengthy label description of the section, their absence is conspicuous. However, in the "Fruit" section and again in the "Trompe I'Oeil" section, there are perfect examples of decaying fruit (one label doesn't even acknowledge its symbolic value) that would have been far more effective in the "Vanitas" gallery...
Despite these shortcomings, some of the pieces in the exhibition are worth examining more closely. The sections entitled "Trompe I'Oeil" and "Twentieth Century Still Life" liven up an otherwise drab show. The former category merits a close look because of the amazing technical skill with which they were painted. Most notable is "The Slate" of 1890-94 by John Haberle, in which the entire canvas is painted to look like a chalky slate, complete with a wooden frame, and, as the label points out, uses scientific precision and detail to create a canvas that appears messy and smudged...