Word: laocoon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...represent the inwardness of the body, Bacon holds a high place, along with Schiele, Kokoschka and Giacometti. He breaks the chain of pessimistic expectation by taking his prototypes beyond themselves into grandeur. In earlier art there was a repertoire of classical emblems of energy and pathos, starting with the Laocoon, that painters could draw on for this operation. Bacon's starting point is less authoritative: photographs of anonymous, hermetic white bodies in Eadweard Muybridge's The Human Figure in Motion, a snap of a baboon or a footballer in blurred motion, a wicketkeeper whipping the ball across the stumps...
Unlike her previous books, which tend to degenerate into a string of unrelated, if interesting, incidents, Tuchman binds the four examples together with common factors. Starting with the original Laocoon, a citizen of Troy who felt that various natural phenomena promised doom, Tuchman goes on to find modern-day Laocoons. John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. and McGeorge Bundy. Moreover, each instance of folly described by Tuchman builds on the one before it: modern leaders repeat--and expand--the mistakes of their predecessors...
Copley never did master the grand manner as prescribed by Reynolds. His huge, ambitious history painting, Watson and the Shark, 1778, is a beloved American classic thanks to, not in spite of, its earnest potpourri of quotations from Titian, Raphael, the Borghese Gladiator and the Laocoon. But at the level of the portrait he was exact and forceful. The tight, heavy faces, didactic hands and subtly registered expressions of Copley's New Englanders read like indexes of American character, and his painting of Thomas and Sarah Mifflin (1773) is one of the great 18th century images of the enlightened...