Word: offing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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A period of just 11 years--1911 to 1922--contains the greatest painting, play, novel and poem of this century and encompasses as well major annunciatory works by the authors of what we deem our greatest musical composition and sculpture, and not a few runners-up in several categories. To...
1911. Matisse paints The Red Studio, "discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color," as his biographer Hilary Spurling puts it. Already burdened by the Fauve ("wild beast") misnomer, his public saw his work as a threat "to undermine civilization as they knew it." At virtually...
1913. Stravinsky premieres his ballet The Rite of Spring in Paris, setting the audience into a riotous frenzy with his rhythms--violent syncopation, sudden changes of meter, "barbaric" repetitions--subverting everyone's expectations for a predictable and reassuring beat. We are but a moment from Wozzeck (1925) and on the...
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1914. World War I begins. Its mindless slaughter heightens and validates the modernist vision. Picasso, watching the military vehicles rumble through Paris, sees in their camouflage painting a kind of Cubism, therefore a kind of modernist triumph. That same year James Joyce begins Ulysses, overturning our traditional expectations for action...