Word: vase
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...graced a Grecian banquet table and held perhaps seven gallons of wine. So proud were its makers, the painter Euphronios and the potter Euxitheos, that each signed his name boldly on the front. Even now, 2,500 years later, the calyx krater is not merely the best Greek vase in existence. It is the costliest, having been bought last summer by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art for $1,000,000. As of last week, it was also by far the most controversial...
...furor began when the New York Times, advancing further in its holy war against the Met, charged that the vase was booty dug up by grave robbers at an Etruscan site north of Rome in 1971 and illegally sold to an expatriate American named Robert E. Hecht Jr. He in turn, so the story went, smuggled the vase out of Italy and sold it to the Met. In 1970 UNESCO adopted a draft prohibiting illicit traffic in art objects. The calyx krater would come under that provision, and both the U.S. and Italy have signed the pact...
...originally said the vase came from a reputable dealer who got it from a European collection where it had rested since "before World War I." With the atmosphere already full of acrimony over Met policies (TIME, Feb. 26), the museum's officials were aloof and cautious. The curator of Greek and Roman Art, Dietrich von Bothmer, did admit that Hecht was the dealer. But at first he refused to identify Hecht's source, adding with either remarkable disingenuousness or extraordinary lack of judgment that the name was difficult to spell and he couldn't remember it. Eventually...
First he poisoned his favorite dog Wolf. Then he took his new wife to his private quarters and sat down on a sofa beside her. Before them was a coffee table on which were a vase of roses, a vial of cyanide and his 7.65 Walther automatic pistol. He did not use the gun. Instead he swallowed the cyanide, and as he struggled for air, his wife shot him in the left temple with her own weapon, a 6.35 Walther. Then she poisoned herself...
...such a combination can be imagined-both bland and maniacal. Hockney's enormous Still Life (Glass Table), 1972, is played down almost to silence; none of the spidery, wandering and quirkish line of his graphic work survives in it. Object answers object, bowl to lamp shade to vase of tulips, across an expanse of plate glass that seems as large and expectant as a De Chirico piazza. Everything is given extreme distinctness but deprived of weight, and the effect is decidedly eerie...