Word: promethean
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...certainly a shift from Modernism, but to where? Apparently, to "Manhattanism"-that fantasy-laden, Promethean language of shaped towers that produced the great monuments of the '20s and '30s: Rockefeller Center, Empire State, the Chrysler Building. As the architect Rem Koolhass has argued in his brilliantly suggestive book, Delirious New York (Oxford, 1978), these were the definitive fantasy-structures of American capital, the cathedrals of a "culture of congestion" that finds its apogee in the 1,244 blocks of Manhattan Island. No glass slab could hope to be as rich in imagery as the work of an architect like Raymond...
...letter to his German collaborator, Frederick Engels. More appealingly, there is a vignette of the whitebearded Marx trotting obediently on all fours round his London home, ridden by a five-year-old grandson. Marx's strengths and weaknesses are carefully chronicled: the affectionate relationship with his daughters, the Promethean capacity for work, the hopeless improvidence with money, the raging, pitiless hatreds for fellow Socialists who failed to follow his dictates. The least familiar persona is Marx the philanderer. Here he is, at 43, unrestrainedly wooing his 24-year-old cousin during a fund-raising expedition to The Netherlands...
...being scorched before, and, as it were, froze behind." Which is why he devised "the New-Invented Pennsylvanian Fire-Place"-better-known as the Franklin stove-which, he boasted, made his room twice as warm with a quarter as much wood as a conventional hearth. Franklin never patented his promethean invention, wishing to share its back-to-front benefits with the world, and a variety of stoves modeled on his old reliable are manufactured...
...still life. From 1909 onward, he painted it at least 30 times: close up or on the skyline, seen from above or below, aggressively sharp or half-dissolved in mists of color, broken, dislocated, twisting upward, a veritable Tower of Babel. No painter had dealt with this emblem of Promethean man before, and it is not surprising that some of Delaunay's images of it-especially the Red Eiffel Tower, 1911-12 (see color)-were tinged with anthropomorphism: a red, two-legged form, trusses and girders, ramping about like Zarathustra...
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire; They are the books, the arts, the academes...