Word: vigor
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John Stuart Mill, in his essay On Liberty, considered eccentricity in a nation's character to be "proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor and moral courage it contained." Britain has always esteemed such doughty dotties as the 19th century Roman Catholic naturalist, Charles Waterton, who devoted his life to exterminating black rats in England on the ground that they were foreigners smuggled into the country by Hanoverian Protestants. The 1951 Festival of Britain even set aside a section of one pavilion to commemorate oddballs. Britain's contemporary eccentrics manifest more energy than originality, but Britons...
...Reclining Female Nude, relates directly to his sculptural experimentation in primitive forms, but even here, lyricism, his greatest gift, predominates. From 1911 to 1915, Modigliani was profoundly influenced by Cubist distortion of the human form, and most of his drawings from this period are unsatisfying. In oil paint, the vigor of his rough and somewhat arbitrary compositions is easily expressed but soft and hard graphite pencil on a thin, flexible paper cannot imbue them with the necessary conviction. The scribbly, hectic quality of a piece like La Francaise indicates the extent to which the Cubist treatment of the human form...
...which can do what they will with it. But it may at last replace the usual pat "biography" required by colleges, and students will get no help from papa. More important, it may help U.S. schools to find time somehow for putting meaning into words-with clarity, order, thought, vigor...
...control of Mandrian and vigor of Leger, Giacometti and Chagall are the only significant assets of this sprawling show. For the most part, it gives one the impression that modern artists are sloppy and devoid of imagination. Though such is not the case at all, the till-now reticent benefactors of the Museum of Fine Arts presumably don't know this. Needless to say, the present exhibition is not going to enlighten them...
...Doctor Zhivago has already shown, the sense of life in Pasternak is heightened by the flashing vigor of his imagery; sometimes he welds disparate images to startle the reader into a rebirth of wonder. At the first patter of a summer drizzle, "dust swallowed up the pills of raindrops." In an offshore storm, "skies crouch lower/ Flying downward/ Steep/ Sea slopes/ And finger the deep/ With wings of clamorous gulls...