Word: wanda
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most durable institutions. The audience for advanced art is, as Roy Lichtenstein once wryly observed, about as big as the audience for advanced chemistry. Wyeth's audience, however, runs into the millions. His infrequent exhibitions -the most recent of which is a retrospective organized by Art Historian Wanda M. Corn at the De Young Museum in San Francisco-jam the galleries with visitors; in the U.S. only Picasso can pull more crowds than Wyeth. The price of a Wyeth watercolor begins at about $20,000, and his minutely detailed tempera paintings, of which he manages to finish about...
...March issue ranges from an article on new gains by teachers' unions to a progress report on the education of the handicapped. One teacher, Wanda Gray, explains how she encourages self-expression and understanding by assigning the pupil to interview his parents. What was school like when they were eleven? The children then make taped or written documentaries of their home and neighborhood. What is bedtime like? How does it sound when you get up in the morning...
Feminist. The oldest generation is brassily represented by Wanda-44 when the narrative begins in 1950. She is "a large, heavy-boned, unpretty woman with a weathered skin, and eyes too deep and close together for their owner to be taken as anything other than troublesome." A 1930s-style feminist -and ex-Communist who left her artist-husband when he began to go commercial-Wanda virtuously teaches her daughter the credo of what used to be quaintly called "free love...
Scarlet serves Mother Wanda right by disobeying with stubborn chastity, then becoming pregnant the night she loses her virginity. With her friends, she constitutes a kind of neither-nor generation. Rebellious against their parents, rebellious against their children, they are rebellious, above all, against the men they off-and-on love, and yet they still seem unable to organize their lives without them. Weldon men are talkers rather than doers. The aesthetes end up in ad agencies, the back-to-nature idealists wind up turning a profit on battery-stimulated hens. Seldom, if ever, do they make decent lovers...
...Wanda cries, and "the force of the expletive shatters even her." But men, finally, are not the enemy. Mrs. Weldon can even pity them. "Man seems not so much wicked as frail," she writes, "unable to face pain, trouble and growing old." What she cannot forgive is nature. "A good woman," she concludes with supreme bitterness, "knows that nature is her enemy. Look at what it does to her." Down Among the Women is a passionate diatribe against the cruel specialities of female mortality, against a "terrible world, where chaos is the norm, life a casual exception to death...