Word: terrain
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Ellmann's Wilde is neither the corrupt seducer his enemies reviled nor the Orphic martyr enshrined by his champions. He emerges instead as a celebrant of mixed motives, a pioneer in the uncharted terrain of what would much later, and inelegantly, be termed the identity crisis. Except that, for Wilde, there was no crisis. The pampered, brilliant youth from Dublin set out to make his fortune by inspired conversation and the constant reshaping of himself. "My Irish accent was one of the many things I forgot at Oxford," he noted, characteristically telling the truth and a joke at the same...
...multitude comes from two Ethiopian villages, Asbi and Habes, in the dusty, barren hills to the north. Some walked all day and all night across 31 miles of craggy terrain to reach this scorched patch just outside Wukro, a district capital in the province of Tigre. Once again a drought has cursed Tigre, and once again the hungry have come to receive food from relief workers. Family after family moves past the rough wood table to register for the donations. Each supplicant dips a finger in purple dye to ensure that there is no cheating for seconds. "It is worse...
...ambitions for painting range across myth and history, they cover an immense terrain of cultural reference and pictorial techniques, and on the whole they do it without the megalomaniac narcissism that fatally trivializes the work of other artists to whom Kiefer is sometimes compared -- Julian Schnabel, for instance. Kiefer bears, in full measure, the tragic sense and redemptive hope against which most of the art of our fin de siecle has insulated itself, and his stature can only grow with time. Which is not to say, of course, that all his work is of equal value...
...When Kiefer paints a Nazi monument, such as the Mosaic Room in Hitler's Chancellery in Berlin, designed by Speer, he also evokes by implication the noble tradition of German neoclassicism that Speer froze and vulgarized. His charred, plowed landscapes, their heavy paint mixed with straw, are real agricultural terrain, but they are also frontier, no- man's land, graveyard and the biblical desert of Exodus...
...plagiarist, when he wrote that the light in his paintings "cannot be put out because it is the light of Nature -- the mother of all that is valuable in poetry, painting or anything else where an appeal to the soul is required." Natural vision, the sense of English terrain, exalted hopes of freedom, fear of the apocalyptic violence that lurked in human nature and, above all, a sense of rebirth in all departments of life -- it is not easy to reimagine the ferment of those times. Throughout Europe, the 1790s were a hinge on which the very idea of culture...