Word: paradox
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...paradox of art history that some of the most influential sculptures of modern times were never actually seen by the men they influenced. They were four metal-rod constructions that Picasso made in 1928-29. Known only from photographs, these light, airy images-a form of "drawing in space" -helped shift the attention of postwar sculptors in America and Europe away from the solid block and toward open structure. But Picasso never allowed them to be sold to a dealer, a collector, or a museum; they remained in his own collection in France after they had been rejected...
Vivid Portrait. The city and the decade provide a nostalgic paradox that has fascinated novelists, scholars and citizens from Christopher Isherwood and Hannah Arendt to the long lines currently waiting to see Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. Otto Friedrich has combined history and cultural journalism to produce the most vivid portrait of the period yet written. Weaving back and forth in time and place between Marlene Dietrich and Joseph Goebbels, between Berlin and Hollywood, between 1920 memoirs and 1971 interviews, the author, who is a former managing editor of the Saturday Evening Post and now a TIME senior editor, has recreated...
...Escher's asset was an intricately schematic intelligence, and this he used with such wit and patience that he became, without modern rival, a master of visual paradox. A great many of Escher's prints were about teasingly blocked situations. They are scientific demonstrations of how to visualize the impossible. What they propose is a kind of n-dimensional reality in which the laws of perception are temporarily repealed. The most innocent images contain excruciating traps...
Escher knew that his work was based on paradox. "The problem itself," he said, "is a question without an answer. Why has man, from prehistoric times until today, allowed himself to be so influenced by his own suggestions of space which he depicts on a flat plane that he forgets that they are illusions?" No question about representation is more profound, and Escher's pursuit of it secures him a small place in the history of perception. "Robert Hughes
...essence, all agreed with the principle that violence begets violence, but also apprehended the basic paradox: one can dilute Gunsmoke and The Mod Squad, but how to make blithe stories out of Bangladesh and Bogside...