Word: woven
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Howard Fast is a very American writer. His powerful writing draws on a rich personal history tightly woven with the history of the country. Born in 1914, Fast struggled up from poverty in New York in the '30s, publishing his first book at 18. During World War II he found work as a war correspondent. By the end of the war he had embraced the Communist Party as a major force fighting for man's freedom, and by the end of the decade he had been tried in the fire of the nation's anti-communist paranoia. Brought before...
...outs are Matisse's last resolution of two visions of nature that were woven into his birthright as a painter: the European heritage of symbols. One was the artificial paradise garden, whose chief example (for Matisse) was the Alhambra in Granada-nature tamed, formalized and patterned to the highest degree of artifice and comfort. A work like the Large Decoration with Masks, 1953, with its repeated gridwork of leaves and cloves, alludes directly to Arabic tilework. But the other prototype was the vision of the natural paradise, exemplified since the 18th century by Tahiti. Matisse had gone to Tahiti...
...design establish the mood, the period and the place of the action. Thus-to a Japanese theatergoer who knew the rules-a costume like the karaori robe in russet silk (see color] would at once suggest a Heian-period court, somewhere between A.D. 800 and 1200. The balls, woven with exquisite precision in raised white silk, refer to a Heian court game called kemari, an aristocratic and pointless kind of football with no rules. The game consisted of several players kicking a bean-stuffed ball around a courtyard in which stood certain trees-cherry, maple, pine, bamboo and (here worked...
Likewise, the extraordinary 17th century outer robe covered with woven brocade designs of autumnal grasses is intended (so the catalogue notes inform us) to convey the "melancholy, somewhat desolate mood" of "a lonely field at dusk." If this is melancholy, the mood was never more lyrically conveyed. The robe is an anthology of natural observation, with seven types of plants rendered in a marvelously clear, springy line, through gradations of color that result from the separate tinting, part by part, of each of the thousands of silk threads. Where the brown, gray and blue rectangles of the background meet...
...patterns repeatedly form on the large wooden floors as workers unfold and spread out the sails to measure, cut and apply serial numbers to them. Designed in part by computers, the sails are made from special cloth manufactured by the Hood company in Marblehead and Fall River. This tightly woven cloth maintains sails' shapes without the customary use of resin which can disintegrate under stress and weathering...