Word: plaster
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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There was always something odd about Edward John Burra. His classmates laughed when they caught him daubing red paint on the noses of classical plaster casts at art school, but they watched in awed wonder when he took to drinking champagne out of ashtrays and washing his face in film developer. When Burra's health forced him to quit school and moderate his prankish ways, he retired to his parents' house in Rye, on England's South Coast, made a studio of his old top-floor nursery and settled down to work while gradually transforming the place...
...taking the sun. One of his legs was off at the knee. Inside, his son and daughter-in-law lived with their nine children in two rooms. The eldest girl had just borne an illegitimate baby. Tattered cotton coverlets lay in disorder on the only three beds. Chunks of plaster had fallen from the walls, exposing the laths. There was no heat; water came from a faucet in the yard. The young Negro wife giggled in embarrassment, twiddled the wick of the oil lamp that furnished the only light...
...flower beds of Mayor Peng Chieh's spacious gardens were littered with bits of wood, plaster and broken glass. A man wrestled with a steam radiator, trying to get it on his shoulder. A coolie, stripped bare to the waist, grinned: 'I didn't like the mayor, anyway...
House cleaning one morning, Mrs. Arthur Martin of Syracuse, N.Y. dusted the plaster statue of St. Anne a little too hastily: it toppled from the window ledge into the cement driveway below and broke into pieces. It was swept up and dropped in an ashcan and there the eldest of the Martins' four children, a lively, questing, eleven-year-old named Shirley Anne, found...
Sculpture is thankless work these days. Private collectors and museums can seldom afford it, public buildings do without it; even Roman Catholic churches, which supported Western sculpture for centuries, now generally buy mass-produced statues of painted plaster (TIME, Jan. 17). The wonder is that sculptors keep going, and manage to chip out such new works as were shown at Manhattan's Whitney Museum last week...