Word: tangier
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...French artist Eugene Delacroix did something that would change the course of his own art, and to no small degree that of French painting itself. He left Paris and went to Morocco -- an arduous journey in those days, on winter roads to Marseilles and then by naval frigate to Tangier. It was made easier by his connections. The 34-year-old painter was traveling with his friend, a French diplomat named Charles de Mornay, sent to conclude a treaty with Moulay Abd-er-Rahman, the Sultan of Morocco. (France had conquered neighboring Algeria the year before and did not want...
Morocco meant both these things. "This people is wholly antique," he wrote in Tangier; its Arab men and Jewish women -- Arab women were not paintable, since they would not remove their veils for a Western stranger -- possessed, in his eyes, "the majesty which is lacking among ourselves in the gravest circumstances." Years later he confided in a letter to a friend that "it was among these people that I really discovered for myself the beauty of antiquity." And not only of antiquity, either. De Mornay was amused to see that when Delacroix was finally admitted to a harem, he became...
...announcing itself in his watercolor drawing of a Jewish bride in Tangier, whose costume, in all its fantastic profusion of embroidery, overlays and gold jewelry, is suggested in a few washes of pink, vermilion, blue and yellow. He developed it to full pitch in the oil paintings he did later in his Paris studio. It would lead to the packed density of pattern-on-pattern in Women of Algiers (1834) and receive its homages from both Matisse and Picasso...
...Street Scene, Tangier (Man Leading Calf) (circa 1910), Henry Ossawa Tanner. Another image of subservience: the calf must go wherever its master leads it -- no matter how well-implemented the calf's ideas for reinventing government...
...life of a country gentleman in France. But this time Ripley plays the mouse; the cats are two creepy new American neighbors who seem to know his darkest secrets. Part of the pleasure of reading Highsmith comes from her evocative descriptions of place, whether small French villages or Tangier or London. Even so, they are but momentary diversions from the sense of foreboding and the most terrifying question of all: Why do we hope the psychopathic Ripley will prevail...