Word: tangier
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...schoolhouse. Henry James found Homer's "barefoot urchins and little girls in calico sun-bonnets...almost barbarously simple" and "horribly ugly," but conceded that they won you over: Homer "has resolutely treated them as if they were pictorial, as if they were every inch as good as Capri or Tangier...he has incontestably succeeded." Homer was one of the key figures in whose work Americanness ceased to be an embarrassment. The cultural cringe before Europe vanishes and is replaced by a robust confidence in American experience...
...class warriors can point out sullenly that if you were trying to write off a chateau in Normandy and a palace in Tangier and a 727 while claiming that what looks like an estate in New Jersey is a cattle ranch, you'd find the current tax code complicated...
...Pillars of Hercules (Putnam; 509 pages; $27.50), Theroux records a grand tour of the Mediterranean, from Gibraltar to Tangier the long way around--that is to say, via the Spanish coast, Corsica, Albania and several points east, aboard wheezing buses, cranky trains and (once) a luxury cruise ship larded with rich Americans. Fans of previous Theroux travelogs like The Happy Isles of Oceania will relish some familiar ingredients. There is, for starters, his dazzling prose, which in a flick of a paragraph can shift from lowly growls of disgust to images of seascape with the allusive force of poetry...
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...