Word: piranesian
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Nowhere is it more brilliantly manifested than in his lawcourt drawings: the pompous judges, the robed lawyers whispering their deals and making their pleas, the cavernous Piranesian spaces of the anteroom to the Palace of Justice known as the Salle des Pas-Perdus, or Room of Wasted Steps, the frightened clients, the stone-faced ushers, the bewildered accused in the dock. It took another 19th century genius, Dickens, to convey in fiction what Daumier gives in line and wash: the sense of the law, not as a means toward fairness or justice but as an enormous and self-feeding machine...
...Miami Beach, Haas transformed the annex of a beachfront hotel into an Art Deco triumphal arch with gargantuan caryatids. In Cincinnati, on the facade of an office building, he simulated a Piranesian cutaway of a coffered Roman temple. His latest creation, on a lobby wall in Boston, is a lyrical evocation of a 19th century crystal pavilion, complete with painted palm trees and an image of tumbling water that blurs into a real fountain...
...Italian pavilion in the public gardens, and sampled all the national pavilions from the U.S.'s to Yugoslavia's, and sated whatever appetite you may have for the installation pieces of Aperto 88, the section for artists under 40 that stretches like a deconstructionist via crucis through the long Piranesian gloom of the rope walk at the Arsenal, you can go back to the museums and immerse yourself in the Venetian past, an experience that tends to put some of the achievements of late or postmodernism in perspective. Moreover, it takes you away from the throng of dealers and neocollectors...
...charmless white marble skin in the mid- 1960s. The dowager has been turned into a cheap mummy, yet the disposition of Times Tower remains an architectural cause celebre. Johnson and Burgee once proposed that the building be stripped down to its steel skeleton, gaily painted and lighted -- a wry Piranesian folly absolutely perfect for the spot. What seems more likely, alas, is that the building will be demolished and replaced by a conventionally highfalutin plaza, monumental and mute...
...Song of Solomon, interweave in Kiefer's work in a haunting and oblique way. Margarete's presence is signaled, like a motif in music, by long wisps of golden straw, while Shulamite's emblem is charred substance and black shadow. Hence Kiefer's tragic image of Shulamite, 1983: a Piranesian perspective of a squat, fire-blackened crypt, the paint laid thick in an effort to convey the ruggedness of the masonry, whose architectural source (as Mark Rosenthal points out in his astute introduction to the difficulties of Kiefer's work) was a Nazi "Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers...