Word: scape
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Wallant's people are the walking wounded and unofficial dead of the affluent society. They inhabit what is known in officialese as "substandard housing," but they are figures in a land scape of hell. Wallant writes with lyrical affection of falling plaster, the colors of linoleum, the awful caprice of electrical fixtures, and the ebb and flow of cruel plumbing. He sniffs the eternal odors of poverty, sin and despair on stairway, landing and daybed. The flaking walls about his creatures are a barometer of the damp weather in the soul. His theme is the pursuit of grace among...
There are times when a canvas seems to have a life that is completely its own. The flavor or color of a remembered land scape may start things off, but then the painting process takes over ("If it lasts too long, I get bored"). Once, when one such canvas was done, Willem de Kooning, 56, the Grand Old Man of the New York School, dubbed it Christmas Tree, because it had been painted at that time of year. But Joan Mitchell remembered the dark and blue feeling of a Wallace Stevens poem that spoke of peacocks and hemlocks...