Word: realist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...great 19th century French realist Gustave Courbet once said that an artist ought to be able to render something--a distant pile of sticks, say, in a field--without actually knowing what it was. The hyperrealist Chuck Close has gone one better than that. In 1971 he painted the face of his father-in-law Nat Rose. The huge, minutely detailed likeness was bought by a Maryland collector who lent it to the Whitney Museum in New York City. There it was seen by an ophthalmologist who, not sure whether he was intruding or not, got a message to Close...
...what point does an array of colored squares in a regular grid begin to turn into a recognizable image? The question touches on the mystery of Realist painting--how it is, for instance, that when looking close up at a Velasquez you see a flurry of gray-and-pink spots and streaks, and when you move back a couple of feet, that same patch has become a glistening silver embroidery on rose velvet. All of Close's art recalls his fixation on this effect, the brain seeking illusion in pattern, questing for clues: Close will break a face down into...
...realist in means but an idealist in ends. Above all, F.D.R. stood for humanity against ideology. The 20th was the most ideological of centuries. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin systematically sacrificed millions to false and terrible dogmas. Even within the democracies, ideologues believed that the Great Depression imposed an either/or choice: if you abandon laissez-faire, you are condemned to total statism. "Partial regimentation cannot be made to work," said Herbert Hoover, "and still maintain live democratic institutions...
...long as they are unfulfilled. Ben-Gurion always wanted Israel to become a "Light unto the Nations," an exemplary polity abiding by the highest moral standards. He himself, and his Israel, could hardly live up to such expectations. But he was, to borrow a literary term, a fantastic realist who gave his people an elemental, Old Testament leadership during the most fateful half-century in their history...
...these changes, these moves toward a new flexibility, somehow Mao's legacy? Despite the agony he caused, Mao was both a visionary and a realist. He learned as a youth not only how Shang Yang brought harsh laws to the Chinese people, even when they saw no need for them, but also how Shang Yang's rigors helped lay the foundation in 221 B.C. of the fearsome centralizing state of Qin. Mao knew too that the Qin rulers had been both hated and feared and that their dynasty was soon toppled, despite its monopoly of force and efficient...