Word: switzerland
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Andorra is a quiet, whitewashed country, small and seemingly guiltless. But Max Frisch's mythical principality (which bears a suspicious resemblance to the playwright's native Switzerland during the Second World War) is also bourgeois, complacent, chauvinistic, murderous. Sam Guckenheimer's production of Andorra tries to dramatize a Semite-as-scapegoat projection by a society of private interests united out of fear. It works, but blunts a few edges of Frisch's dialogue...
When Alberto Giacometti died at 65 in his native Switzerland eight years ago, he was already a figure of legend. His seamed casque of a head (like that of a Renaissance condottiere) and his cramped, dust-floured studio in Paris, had become almost as famous as Picasso's simian mask and opulent villas. He was, it seemed, the existentialist answer to Mediterranean man. And as such he appeared to be one of the very few sculptors who, in the 20th century, had discovered a fresh convention for the human body - spindly and eroded, impossibly vertical, a gobbet of clay...
Political orientation seems to make no difference. Greece, ruled by a right-wing military dictatorship, is reeling from a 33% inflation?the worst in Europe. Conservative Switzerland, long regarded as a bastion of financial prudence, registers an almost 12% annual inflation. In the Communist world, government control of the economy makes most price figures meaningless, but one nation?Yugoslavia?maintains a market system, and there, prices are zooming at the rate of 22% a year...
From the middle 1850s when, as a schoolboy in Switzerland and an undergraduate at Göttingen University, he began picking up fragments of stained glass from ruined churches, buying works of art was his obsession. Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, rare drawings, incunabula (literally, things from the cradle, or books printed before 1501), bookbindings, historical documents and letters-these poured into his vaults, sucked from Europe as by a vacuum cleaner by the limitless power of his funds. After 1906 the collection was housed in the Morgan Library, a Manhattan palazzo designed by McKim, Mead & White that is itself...
...then helped him to pay off his campaign debts. Vesco also put Sears on a $60,000-a-year retainer as part-time counsel and a director of his International Controls Corp., which had taken over Investors Overseas Services, the rickety mutual-fund empire glued together in Switzerland by Bernard Cornfeld...