Word: sinuously
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Simple Beauty. Matisse's style was sinuous as Chinese brush drawing, clearcut as Persian miniatures, and sometimes as flat as Turkish rugs; his art had ancestors around the globe. Beauty of the most serene and sensuous sort, achieved by the simplest means possible, was always his goal. He never tired of it, and consistently splendid triumphs of the pursuit flowed from his brush until he died. No 20th century painter had higher esthetic standards-or met them more often...
...strange place, half fairyland and half Punch cartoon. Puckish faces were everywhere, and they bore a remarkable resemblance to the artist-bright-eyed, point-nosed, with an expression of gaiety rampant. The show included chummy centaurs bearing candles, chubby wood nymphs lurking in the shrubbery, birds that never were, sinuous but homey maidens, and friendly eggheads sprouting flowers. One Stolen Nymph, her navel flower-decked, sat sidesaddle aboard a centaur, who was chiefly interested in some birds. She looked piqued...
...What they saw looked pretty much like a Russian version of the dances at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall. Carrying birch branches and dressed in a variety of robes and Cossack costumes with boots, the girls whirled, waved and wove through a succession of intricate drills and sinuous dances. They displayed great verve, precision and variety. In one number, they moved smoothly, as if on roller skates ("the Russian glide," one critic called it); in another, they did a stomping Cossack dance that shook the floor boards. They formed a troika (with three girls acting as horses), chains...
...allowed to pray from the sidelines, they were invited on to the floor during the social get-together. Dabkah (folk-dancing) shared popularity with a unique money-raising device known as the Raqsa. Originally a wedding dance done solo by a young woman, Toledo's Raqsa was a sinuous, shoulder-shaking affair which whirled to a stop with arms hopefully extended for cash. Delegates found this a pleasant way to part with about $1,000 during the three-day convention...
...romance-minded commentators of the i gth century found the lady less cheerful than beguiling. Theophile Gautier wrote that her "sinuous, serpentine mouth, turned up at the corners, in the violet shadows, mocks you with so much gentleness, grace and superiority, that you feel suddenly intimidated, like a schoolboy before a duchess...