Word: satyr
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Shepherds and nymphs, young soldiers and scholars, madonnas, saints and animals loll about in a state of pure being, with no future tense. Arcadia has ruins, sometimes quite grand ones -- as in Claude Lorrain's classical revisions of the pastoral landscape, here represented by the Landscape with Nymph and Satyr Dancing, 1641 -- but Roman architecture does not include a stern call to Roman virtue and gravity. Arcadia's weather is always equable, and its views intimate and mellow. Above all, its location is not too far out of town; Giorgione, Titian, Rubens and other pastoralists never fail to include...
...life. But in some of Kokoschka's last paintings there is the real sense of an old man's rage and an old man's freedom -- the sort of deliberate clumsiness by a highly gifted draftsman, the sense of the ludicrous posture, the gross energy of the old satyr, that fires up our responses when we look at a good late Picasso. Nowhere does this come out better than in Theseus and Antiope, the huge canvas he began in 1958 and worked on intermittently for 16 years, leaving it unfinished at the time of his death. If one can speak...
...then served sweet- and-sour at a Chinese restaurant in Middle-Earth. "I require the solace of shadows," he purrs to the benighted Lili. "Neath the skin, we are already one." And he leads her into a dance that black magically turns this virgin into Salome, fit for a satyr king. The film has grown up now; this is a bedtime story peopled with creatures of enticement and desire. Though Jack comes to the rescue, and Lili comes to her senses, their victory rings hollow. For the erotic legend that brings Legend alive is older than King Arthur, let alone...
This enormous late work casts its ghostly and turbulent shadow over the whole gallery where other Titians, Veroneses and Moronis hang. Its subject is probably the most repulsive in the classical lexicon: the implacably vain Apollo has beaten the satyr Marsyas in a music contest judged by the nine Muses; now he collects his forfeit, which is to skin Marsyas alive. Renaissance humanists turned this myth into a fable of reason triumphing over darker instincts, and it was in that sense that Titian meant to paint...
...hard to decide which is more horrible, the matter-of-factness of the Venetian lap dog, familiar from many a Carpaccio, licking up the satyr's blood, or the prim, detached attentiveness of Apollo as he peels the skin. Yet the whole unlikely scene is anchored by one riveting device: Titian must have seen boar hunts in the woods around his native Cadore, and the satyr is strung on the tree like a wild pig ready for dressing, every stiff hair on his matted legs contributing its realism to the myth. On the right is another of Apollo...