Word: puritans
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Isabella Stewart Gardner, a lifelong Protestant of good New England Puritan stock, seems an odd choice for a collector of crucifixes. But Mrs. Gardner, always one for surprises, owned sixteen crucifixes (or portions thereof), which are currently hanging in the Gardner's exhibition room...
...life-the daily trips to the boulangerie and weekly ones to the market, the occasional glass of vin rouge with some fresh p?t?, the tiled roofs and stone walls of the village itself-than many a millionaire in my great home state of Texas. (Quelle horreur! the Puritan mind exclaims, a welfare mother with a glass of wine! In France, however, even welfare mothers are entitled to the occasional vin rouge.) And my impoverished sister-in-law, unlike so many of those millionaires, knows, in the words of Guy de Maupassant, how "to be charming with nothing...
Does the ancient Puritan connection between virtue and boredom still run beneath the glitzy, pleasure-roiled surface of American culture? For the answer, go and visit the retrospective of Sol LeWitt's paintings, sculpture and prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. It will dispel your doubts, without necessarily offering you lots in the way of superior pleasure. The Puritans, as descendants of the men who tried to destroy the whole legacy of English medieval art, exalted the Word and the Idea and distrusted the visual icon. It was blasphemy to represent the face...
This strain of Puritan denial of the graven image seems never to have quite vanished from American art. But how can you create a way of painting that is devoid, or at least as short as possible, of the delicious pleasures of light, shade, drama, color and suggestive texture--not to mention the primal infantile pleasure of smearing colored mud around on a virginal surface--associated with making a picture? The piety of this search, seen as an act of exemplary denial, is the ghost that haunts the machine of American abstraction--and the emotionless grids of LeWitt's work...
...worry that students underestimate the importance of the upcoming decision. Presidents from Lowell to Pusey to Bok radically shaped the University and played major roles on the national stage. President Leverett freed Harvard from stifling Puritan control. President Eliot transformed the University from a small college to a modern institution and presided over Radcliffe's birth. President Lowell redesigned the liberal undergraduate curriculum and started the House system. President Conant introduced general education curriculum and initiated coeducation with Radcliffe. Beginning with Pusey, Presidents have improved University finances through fundraising and have shaped the College in important ways. Bok began...