Word: slag
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Sometimes it came deep in the earth where Borinage miners scratch out coal from overworked shafts in constant expectation of cave-ins, poison gas, flooding, fire and explosion. More often it came on the grey, slag-heaped surface as miners coughed out their lives. Emile Zola saw the Borinage in the 1880s and poured its horror into his powerful classic, Germinal. A few aged miners still remember the emaciated, stubble-bearded Dutch preacher named Vincent Van Gogh, who lived in one of their hovels, held services and sketched their bowed bodies with fever-palsied hands...
...England's green and pleasant land, few areas are more blighted than Yorkshire's grim and dour West Riding, with its blackened industrial valleys forested with smokestacks, jug-shaped cooling towers, sooty spires and reeking slag heaps. Yet last week, as the Leeds City Art Gallery staged a five-man, 58-piece sculpture show of Yorkshire's native sons, it became abundantly clear that this area of bleak moors is the cradle of Britain's sculpture renaissance...
Much the same could be said of Armitage's own work. Barrel-bodied shapes such as his Standing Figure (see cut), with stiff, sticklike legs and doorknob heads, could have been dug out of a slag pile or found beneath Pompeii buried in volcanic ash. They represent a recent departure for Armitage, who since 1952 has moved away from his flat, screenlike groupings, created figures in the round that won him a $1,000 sculptor's award at this year's Venice Biennale...
...maggots into focus than those fixed by Orwell's baleful lens. He went down the wet, dripping, insecure coal mines on the heels of the naked miners-the comparatively fortunate who still had jobs. His picture of the unemployed miners and their wives scrambling for coal on the slag heaps is a shame...
Sovereignty is not a word often used in connection with a Soviet citizen. But First Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev used it scornfully last week to describe the action of "Comrade Maximov," chairman of the Zhdanov Coke-Chemical works, who had built an 8½-ft.-high slag-block wall 3,000 ft. long (cost: $50,000) to "defend his sovereignty" against the rival Azvostal factory. Although Russia's vast socialized industry works for one boss-the State-competition between ministries, divisions and plant managements is as intense and as predatory as anything to be found in the worst Marxist...