Word: sinuously
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...would have to decide whether to believe it. Welles dragged the movies into modernism, with sequences that keep playing in any film lover's imaginary screening room: the three-story family squabble in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); the hall-of- mirrors gunfight in The Lady from Shanghai (1948); the sinuous tracking shot that opens Touch of Evil (1958) with a bang; the magnificent pacifist battle scene in Chimes at Midnight/Falstaff (1966); and the Chinese-box structure of F for Fake (1975). The last title was appropriate, for Welles ended his directorial film career as he began it, with elegant sleight...
...cage -- homage to an original that Bacon firmly denies having ever seen, the Velasquez portrait of Innocent X in the Doria collection in Rome. There are the Crucifixion motifs, reflections of Grunewald and the Cimabue Crucifixion in Santa Croce that was partly destroyed by the 1966 Florence flood, whose sinuous and near boneless body Bacon once startlingly compared to "a worm crawling down the Cross." There are the humping, grappling figures on pallets or operating tables; the twisted, internalized portraits; the stabbings, the penetrations; the Aeschylean furies pinned against the $ windowpane; and the transformations of flesh into meat, nose into...
...surprisingly, the series has inherited some of the book's shortcomings. As leisurely and sinuous in its flow as the Ganges, sometimes crashing through rapids, more often meandering into tributaries, Jewel does on occasion get bogged down in its own complexities. In the middle episodes, when the action closes in on Layton and four other mem-sahibs, the show could be mistaken for a provincial soap opera, and a brackish one at that. Sometimes too it parades a kind of sincerity that teeters on melodrama. Symbols are spelled out, symmetries underlined, characters displayed with embarrassing nakedness. Merrick never tires...
Here is the 23-year-old star as Adam, alternately impudent and bored in The Creation of the World; here is the sinuous Pedro Romero, the bullfighter of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises; here is the classic, vaulting Pan, making the kind of leaps that remain incredible, even when they are frozen on the page and documented by the author. Alovert's text is eloquent, but nothing can match her photographic chronicle; this is the kind of history that is, in the best sense, revealing...
...Marquesas from 1891 to 1903 is by now one of the soap operas of art history. Yet the curious fact, as Varnedoe points out in a brilliant catalog essay, was that Polynesian art made virtually no impact on his painting; all its primitive elements-the flatness, the sinuous friezelike poses, the outlining-were either there already or deduced from photographs of Javanese, Cambodian and other Oriental material that he took with him. (One should not forget that in the 1880s, Frenchmen were still talking about Japanese art as art pri-mitif.) When he did quote Tahitian art, Gauguin played fast...