Word: realist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Degas did not suddenly become a realist. What happened was more subtle: gradually this quintessential young bourgeois discovered what was to be seen from the eyeline of the bourgeoisie. But his eye for the instant gesture and socially revealing incident went with a lifelong habit of recycling poses and motifs, patching them in. Thus he can be very deceptive: the image that seems the freshest product of observation turns out to have been used half a dozen times before. Degas copied everything from Mantegna to Mogul miniatures, and even the work of lesser painters than himself; an artist, he said...
...many students of literature, Molly Bloom, the heroine of James Joyce's Ulysses, is the greatest character in what may be the greatest novel of the English language. Wife, mother, performer, realist, Earth figure, whore, Molly was to Joyce what the Greek Penelope was to Homer--all that was embodied in the female gender...
Rabassa downplays his role of spreading the good words of Latin American writing. "The credit belongs to the writers, particularly Jorge Luis Borges and Garcia Marquez, who rediscovered Don Quixote. My theory is that Cervantes was the first magical realist. But then the British stole both the Spanish colonies and the Spanish novel. After that, a lot of Latin American literature merely aped European models. But life and the landscape in South America were always more vivid than conventional fiction could convey. Once writers began breaking the rules, their subjects came alive...
...embroider cliches on it. Rather he finds images that seem to trail a whole narrative history behind them, but obliquely -- so that you, as viewer, are put at the threshold of a hidden life that may, if you look closer, be yours. Fischl is a true American realist, but he works at a pitch of psychological truth ! (especially about adolescent sexuality) not known in the American narrative art of his forebears in the '30s. At his best he seems, roughly, a cross between Edward Hopper and the Philip Roth of Portnoy's Complaint. Thus it seems just right that Roth...
...ducks in sailor suits but no pants, and a mouse named Minnie "with lipstick and eyelashes and a dress with high-heeled shoes; a mouse, ten times bigger than the biggest rat." This was mild stuff compared with a 1967 parody that Mad Alumnus Wallace Wood drew for Realist magazine. In the cheerfully scabrous "Disneyland Memorial Orgy," Walt's creatures behaved exactly as barnyard and woodland denizens might. Beneath dollar-sign searchlights radiating from the Magic Kingdom's castle, Goofy had his way with Minnie, Dumbo the flying elephant dumped on Donald Duck, the Seven Dwarfs besmirched Snow White...