Word: 1920s
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...history of art has Pablo Picasso to thank for René Magritte. "You see, like many young painters in the 1920s I wanted to live in Paris," Magritte once told a pair of journalists visiting his picket-fence cottage in suburban Brussels. "And in Paris, there was this wild Catalan who was doing all there was to be done with technique. I could tell there wasn't going to be any technique left for the rest of us to invent. So that's when I decided I was going to paint ideas...
...late 1920s came the movement's narrative period, in which Magritte and Salvador Dali excelled. Magritte's 1926 The Threatened Murderer could practically serve as a film storyboard. It depicts two menacing life-sized detectives - wearing Magritte bowler hats, to be sure - waiting in hiding to pounce on a respectable-looking murderer still hovering near the nude body of his female victim. The picture seems spookily sympathetic to the murderer. The Surrealists, in fact, sometimes admired criminals as creative rule breakers...
...True or False? The Vinland Map, seen since the 1950s as possible proof that Norse explorers reached North America before Christopher Columbus, has been branded a fake. British scientists analyzed the composition of the map's ink and discovered that it dates from the 1920s or later. However, the forger almost got away with it. A forthcoming academic paper reports that carbon-dating methods show that the parchment on which the map was drawn was made around 1434. But the map's defenders are holding fast. "If it is a forgery, then the forger was surely one of the most...
...indeed, life began to turn up just about everywhere scientists looked. Geologists had been arguing since the 1920s, in fact, that chemical contaminants found in crude oil suggested that some sort of life was thriving underground. They weren't taken seriously until the 1980s, though, when Department of Energy scientists realized that if subsurface microbes really did exist, they might play a key role in regulating the purity of groundwater. So they began digging boreholes at DOE sites in South Carolina and Washington State...
...about three hours south of Bangkok, hardly looks like a 21st-century getaway. The country's oldest resort rose to fame in the 1920s, a decade after British engineers punched a railway through deep jungle, eliminating the long elephant rides from Bangkok suffered by the royal family on their beach outings. (Commoners went by canal and oxcart.) For the ensuing half-century, Hua Hin was the place to sun and be seen by upscale Asians and resident expats. But the onset of group travel sent beachgoers to a succession of swank, new beach resorts, leaving Thais largely alone...