Word: painterly
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Juliette Binoche has one of the world's magnificent faces--delicate, intelligent, grave, questing--and this 1991 romance (just released in the States) is the most lustrous showcase for her haggard purity. The plot groans with lower-depths anomie: Michele, a painter who is half blind, camps out on Paris' Pont-Neuf with Alex, a fire eater who is more than half mad. But Carax vitalizes the film with images that sparkle, smolder, catch fire; he might be offering Michele a last visual banquet before her eyes close forever. Binoche's beauty is, naturally, the main course. One watches...
Perhaps it is only fitting that Juneteenth (Random House; 368 pages; $25), Ralph Ellison's long-awaited second novel, almost 50 years in the making, would be published in 1999, the centennial year of Duke Ellington's birth. For Ellington and Ellison, along with the painter Romare Bearden, were practitioners of a shared aesthetic, three titans of an African-American modernism, embodying in their work elegance, eloquence and elan...
...Pankhurst wrote later, "simply a suffrage army in the field." The charismatic, dictatorial eldest daughter Christabel emerged in her teens as the W.S.P.U.'s strategist and an indomitable activist, with nerves of tungsten. Mrs. Pankhurst's second daughter Sylvia, the artist, pioneered the corporate logo: as designer and scene painter of the W.S.P.U., she created banners, costumes and badges in the suffragist livery of white, purple and green. Though the family split later over policy, their combined talents powered from the beginning an astonishingly versatile tactical machine...
...Greenspan married Joan Mitchell, a painter. While they stayed together for less than a year, Joan Mitchell introduced him to Ayn Rand, the author of The Fountainhead and the proponent of the objectivist philosophy of which Greenspan became a follower...
...still, his family (or part of it) was there, and the look of the town and its people delighted the great realist. He wrote to James Tissot, a fellow painter, enthusiastically about "villas with columns in different styles...negroes in old clothes...rosy white children in black arms, charabancs or omnibuses drawn by mules, the tall funnels of the steamboats towering at the end of the main street... Everything is beautiful in this world of people." But, he typically added, one Paris laundress with bare arms "is worth it all for such a pronounced Parisian...