Word: piet
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...memory keeps one picture in particular: St. Peter's Square in May 1981. It shows Pope John Paul II in white robes, capsized backward on his seat, stricken, in a posture vaguely reminiscent of the Pietà. There is an adrenal burst of motion in the scene as the security men spring alive and the Pontiff's white Popemobile lurches off through the crowd...
...hero races toward life as if it promised victory: "Out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs." Updike's men are lovers of the here and now and not afraid to look foolish while saying so. Piet Hanema in Couples, Harry Angstrom in the three Rabbit novels, Bech, assorted adolescents and husbands in the short stories: all act in childlike confidence, as if their surroundings have been put there specifically for them to enjoy. In a typical Updike domestic scene, the young people are more cynical than their parents...
Everyone knows something about Piet Mondrian; barely a detail of his life has escaped the attention of aspiring Ph.D.s, from the fantastic fox-trot routines that earned him the nickname the "dancing madonna," to the exact spot where an artificial tulip stood in his Paris studio (painted white, leaves and all, so as not to offend his eye with the detestable color green). Like Kandinsky, the other fa ther figure of abstract painting, he was a Theosophist: a man given to dreams of the millennium, when material reality would wither away and leave an ideal domain of the pure spirit...
...slices of gable, white posts by the sea, sudden drop-offs of hill or throughway-these images of the California coast have found their way into them, but in a condensed and fully digested idiom whose sources, far back in the early 20th century, are Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian...
...Piet's wife Gladys (Maria Tucci) lives in the fragile limbo of a mind that has broken its moorings. She regards the confiscation of her personal diaries in a police raid as a spiritual rape, and has precariously survived mental therapy. Piet and Gladys nostalgically anticipate the visit of Steve Daniels (James Earl Jones), one of the valiant veterans of the antiapartheid causer as a healing family reunion. But it turns out to be a conflagration of doubt, rage, lost love, recrimination and remorse...