Word: victorianism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...real collector of Italian Renaissance art, in 1852. At the time, few Americans agreed with him. When his collection of 143 Pre-Raphaelite paintings was shown in New York in 1860, critics panned them decisively as "weak and fettered," "the crude expression of Genius grappling with superstition." Snorted one Victorian gallerygoer, viewing a Tuscan religious panel with a gold-leaf background: "More of these d-d ridiculous Chinese paintings...
...nude or seminude, but their bodies seemed merely part of their fantastically elaborate dress. His illustrations for such works as Wilde's Salome, Malory's Morte d' Arthur and Aristophanes' Lyslstrata were likely to include elegant versions of whippings and other aberrations; they shocked the Victorian age while also appealing strongly to the lively pornographic and demonic subculture that flourished in London and Paris. One critic called Beardsley the "Fra Angelico of Satanism." A handsome compliment, but slightly exaggerated. He suggested an elegant imp as much as a Satanic friar...
...Victorian age can now be seen as an outburst of bourgeois baroque-extravagant in form, larger than life, gaudy, ridiculous, but above all productive and resolutely confident. No man better personified this outburst than Explorer Richard Burton,* the magnifico of satanic mien who prowled through unmapped regions like a lion, visited the forbidden cities of Mecca, Medina and Harrar, and discovered Lake Tanganyika...
...Discovery is mostly my mania," he wrote. His biographer answers him back: "Burton's real passion was not for geographical discovery, but for the hidden in man, for the unknowable and therefore the unthinkable. What his Victorian compatriots called unclean, bestial or Satanic, he regarded with almost clinical detachment. In this respect he belongs more properly...
What ever happened to those two old chairs-one a Victorian rocker, one a stuffed armchair-that belonged to Glassboro State College President Dr. Thomas Robinson, 62, and were made famous by being sat upon by Lyndon Johnson and Aleksei Kosygin during the Glassboro summit conference? Robinson stood silent on the momentous matter, but the office of New Jersey Governor Richard J. Hughes disclosed that they had been shipped to Washington, along with an equally historic end table, as a gift for L.B.J. What then? "It's all a great big fat puzzle to me," said a Smithsonian...