Word: pater
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...love became Watteau's exquisite assemblies of lovers and Pierrots, at dusk, beside the Mozartian stone statue. This vision of a society of the elect united by love (which is equally the root of the paradise myth) continued through Watteau's colleagues and imitators, Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Pater - in The Dance (circa 1730) - Nicolas Lancret and the rest. Nor was it altogether lost with the French Revolution. Delacroix, whose painfully stiff early imitations of Rubens (like Henri IV Conferring the Regency on Marie de' Medici) are much to the fore in this show, was able in maturity...
...this production won't gain Gilbert and Sullivan any new admirers, particularly since The Mikado's theme (almost alone among Gilbert's plots) deals with more than minor, absurd social issues of the Victorian age, such as cleaning up salty language (Pinafore), Walter Pater-style aestheticism (Patience), and the House of Lords (Iolanthe). The Mikado, like some of Shakespearian and Johnsonian comedy, is about the impossibility and immorality of repressing the passions. It is the play in which Gilbert moves farthest away from the Victorian center he usually represented and comes closest to criticizing society as well as ridiculing social...
...thinker -the parade of stereotypes marches on. At one moment he struck the Victorians as a prototype of the engineer-hero, a 15th century Brunel or Edison who lacked only the omnipotent semen of capital to make his projects real. At the next, the English 19th century aesthete Walter Pater wrote of his mechanical inventions as mere "dreams, thrown off by the overwrought and laboring brain...
VIDAL HAS WRITTEN another historical novel, Julian, set in much different circumstances. It is the story of Julian the Apostate, a late Roman Emperor, and the novel stands in the Walter Pater tradition. But in Julian Vidal did more than merely ascribe motives to an historical actor--he developed the actor into a rather remarkable character. Burr remains an historical figure, with attributed motives, but little real depth...
That prophet would have more to mock today. Shortly before he died, Duchamp complained: "In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society." The épater la bourgeoisie act gets harder every day. Each new outrage is given a price tag and immediately sold to some collector−frequently as an investment. The vast, despised leviathan−the middle class−has entirely swallowed the artist and his followers. Yet this too is an irony that Duchamp might have enjoyed. As the Philadelphia Museum visitor walks through Duchamp's striking prefigurations...