Word: torment
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Abracadabra! The Evil One relieves Don Juan (Jarl Kulle) of his atrocious eternal torment, seduction without satisfaction, and restores him to life with infernal instructions: lance that sty. The Great Lover-whom Bergman wittily conceives as the typical hero of a hair-oil ad, the sort of won't-you-be-my-Valentino every schoolgirl at some point adores-arrives at the rendezvous to find his ladylove smeared with housepaint and dressed in blue jeans. He stares in dismay. What...
...much some artists can convey just in the eyes! Look at the torment in Sweden's greatest dramatist, Strindberg, as Norway's greatest artist, Edvard Munch, captured it; or the intensity in Shahn's Freud; or the burning glance of Stuart Davis' James Joyce; or the clown's proverbial subdued sadness in Loren Maclver's Emmett Kelly...
...look at The Explorers, one of the book's more successful stories, shows that he is right. Three young hoods with time to kill wander to the edge of the Central Park boat pond and try mockingly to talk with a girl there. When she ignores them, they torment a small Negro boy until she protests. Then, abruptly, they drop the game; it is time for an ominous appointment. Curtain. Weidman delivers his grim moment expertly, but the reader's admiration is mixed. There is something safe and synthetic about the story. One feels that if Hemingway...
...lose the vision of the canvas as a whole, he encouraged them to paint with a palette knife in quick, broad strokes. "Swing a bigger brush. Have enthusiasm," he said. With most students he was rarely harsh, but to a few, his Saturday morning critiques must have been a torment. Once a young woman showed him a sentimental painting of two children playing on a beach. "I'm not going to say a thing about this picture." he said icily. Then, exploding, he roared, "This is a damnable thing!" By the time he had finished, the woman...
...easy to forget. His young girls lounge and stretch themselves, shift uncomfortably as if painfully in doubt about what to do with their newly awakened bodies. What makes them distasteful and at the same time affecting is that the artist himself seems to know exactly the secret of their torment. Balthus' other creatures are equally painful; they share streets and rooms, but they do not speak or even take notice of one another. They fascinate the viewer not by anything they do but simply by what they are-absolutely and agonizingly alone...