Word: polynesian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...grossing $50 million a year and featuring an international chain of 21 restaurants proffering an eclectic South Seas decor, rum drinks garnished with flowers and fruit and an "exotic" cuisine carefully tailored to American middle-brow taste; of a stroke; in Hillsborough, Calif. "You can't eat real Polynesian food," he once protested, calling it "horrible junk." Having lost a leg at age six to tuberculosis (and not, as legend would have it, to a South Pacific shark), he considered himself "not handicapped, merely inconvenienced," and worked tirelessly for 40 years to spread that message to U.S. amputee veterans...
...thing to draw Polynesian temples or the megaliths of Easter Island, as the Georgian William Hodges or Sydney Parkinson did, and quite another to imitate primitive styles as though their artists were as worthy of homage as Raphael or Ingres, which modernism did. The transition from one to another began with Paul Gauguin...
Gauguin's stay in Tahiti and the Marquesas from 1891 to 1903 is by now one of the soap operas of art history. Yet the curious fact, as Varnedoe points out in a brilliant catalog essay, was that Polynesian art made virtually no impact on his painting; all its primitive elements-the flatness, the sinuous friezelike poses, the outlining-were either there already or deduced from photographs of Javanese, Cambodian and other Oriental material that he took with him. (One should not forget that in the 1880s, Frenchmen were still talking about Japanese art as art pri-mitif.) When...
...Parkinson noted, the means used to carve were primitive, but the effect was wondrously sophisticated. What he failed to divine was the reason: carving has been regarded as a sacred occupation since A.D. 900, when the Maoris first sailed in their canoes from other Polynesian islands to the place they called "the land of the long white cloud." To create the taonga whakairo, or decorated treasures prized by the Maoris, a sculptor was expected to combine artistic skill with such qualities as leadership, courage, religious learning and generosity. So revered was the artist that he worked surrounded by student acolytes...
...decision grew out of a suit challenging the constitutionality of the Land Reform Act passed by Hawaii's legislature in 1967. This law was designed to put an end to the remnants of Hawaii's feudal tenure system, a holdover from the islands' settlement by Polynesian immigrants who allowed only high chiefs to own land. The challenge was brought by trustees of the Bishop estate, Hawaii's largest private landowner (340,000 acres...