Word: robert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...polished linoleum. And he got those effects without losing sight of the muddy pleasure of pigment itself, a fundamental notion of modern painting. In a few inches of sailcloth or the slip worn by his Girl at Mirror, he could put white paint through as many adventures as Robert Ryman does in his snow-flurry abstractions. As for his pieties, they turn out sometimes to be the same ones fundamental to civil society. By nothing less than an actual vote among Post readers, Saying Grace was his most popular canvas. In a flyblown city restaurant, a boy and his grandmother...
When it comes to Norman Rockwell, we all know what we're supposed to think. Rockwell is to modern art what Robert Mapplethorpe is to family values--a slap in the face to all serious standards. So much the worse that for decades he was the best-loved American artist, at least until he was usurped by an even shrewder judge of the national disposition, Andy Warhol. To the art world Rockwell was an exasperating holdout, the man who didn't care that in the 20th century it was simply uncalled for to paint sweet-tempered vignettes in a representational...
...youngest brother in his powerful family. The nickname persists because he was blessed and cursed by the gift of years that let him lead a full and well-publicized life that could only diminish him against the gargantuan mythology grown up around his murdered brothers John and Robert...
...books, taken together, right that imbalance somewhat. Edward M. Kennedy, A Biography by New York Times reporter Adam Clymer (William Morrow; 692 pages; $27.50) is a painstaking reconstruction of the Senator's life that winds up placing him alongside such other Senate giants as Hubert Humphrey and Robert Taft. In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy by Ronald Steel (Simon & Schuster; 220 pages; $23) is a hard-eyed rumination on the difference between the real (and of course flawed) Robert Kennedy and the popular memory of his greatness...
Steel calls his book a "meditation" on Robert Kennedy's life. Relieved of the burden of having to tell the whole story, Steel's book is brisk and analytical. He paints this Kennedy as haunted by all sorts of demons, not the least of which was his important role in urging his brother John to commit American forces in Vietnam. This made R.F.K. reluctant to step forward as the candidate of the anti-war movement in 1968 until the bolder Eugene McCarthy had demonstrated President Lyndon Johnson's unpopularity in his own party...