Word: sheerly
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Intense, erotic, opulently colorful, the flower paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe provide a heady mixture of sheer sensory shock and austere formalism, of extreme close-up scale and bold monumentality. In this 100th anniversary year of the artist's birth, a selection has been beautifully reproduced in Georgia O'Keeffe: One Hundred Flowers (Knopf; $100). Their richness and vibrancy seem to leave nothing to say, and Editor Nicholas Callaway, except in a brief afterword, presents the plates without comment. The effect is magnificently simple, and simply magnificent...
...surfeit arises from the sheer size of the show. Its catalog lists 748 items, ranging from a corroded metal pen to a whole stained-glass lancet window from Canterbury Cathedral. It covers manuscripts, paintings, maps, jewelry, seals, coins, heraldry, enamelwork, ceramics, armor, textiles, architecture and a great deal more besides. It traces the patronage of five Plantagenet kings and has a lot to say about how works of art were commissioned by the nobility and the great merchants, executed by their makers and read by the audience. It wanders off into didactic byways and outlines, among other things, the changing...
...sheer quantity of stuff is also connected to a pervasive sense of cultural loss, for large as this show is, it is the merest fragment of the vanished whole it attempts to describe. No people in the history of Europe turned on their own traditional art with a more consuming fury than the English did on their medieval heritage. The destruction began in a small way with the random acts of zealots like the Lollards. They were enraged by the apparent contradiction between the Second Commandment ("Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image") and the "idolatrous" cult...
...tomb in Sawley in Derbyshire -- faces and drapery so refined in their carving, and yet so plain and direct that they bear comparison with the sculpture made for the west door of Notre Dame a century before -- one sees the immensity of the loss. One can also sense the sheer range of feeling accessible to Plantagenet sculptors, from the grotesque and grimacing faces on corbels (meant more as effigies of "types" of men than as specific portraits, however sharp and humorous their realism) to the forbiddingly hieratic tomb effigies of dead lords like Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, lying cross...
Though awareness of alcoholism's destructiveness is growing, the sheer number of alcoholics shows no sign of abating. Young people are especially vulnerable. Bowen states that nearly 5 million adolescents, or three in every ten, have drinking problems. Several studies show that children are beginning to drink earlier than ever before, and a Weekly Reader study earlier this year reported that 36% of fourth-graders were pressured by peers to drink. "Kids are making decisions about alcohol and drugs when they are 12 to 14, whereas in the preceding generation they made those decisions at ages 16 to 18," says...