Word: foregrounding
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Offstage, the distant thunder of great events. In the background, an exotic city, sleepless, decadent and aswarm with corrupt and conniving characters. In the foreground, a displaced American male hides his latent idealism under a shady manner, and a displaced European woman hides her latent sexuality under the guise of loyalty to her husband and the outlawed political cause to which he has made a passionate and dangerous commitment...
...occurred several years after he had returned to France, in The Moroccans, 1915-16. In that dense, grand and mysterious painting, the intensity of light is evoked, with all the courage of paradox, with a predominant velvety black. The ambiguous forms -- Are the green curved objects in the left foreground melons, as some think, or the backsides of Muslims praying to Mecca? -- combine in a pictorial structure of wonderful explicitness and rigor. One sees in the work painters who would not be born for another 20 or 30 years: Frank Stella, Sean Scully. Clearly, though Matisse left Morocco, Morocco never...
...completely lacked the palms, writhing creepers, streams and waterfalls he would later give it. "The big mountain," he wrote to a friend, "grimly secludes itself in an immense circle of volcanic and comparatively barren country." The nearest palms were a hundred miles away. But without foreground vegetation, there was no hope of making the volcano look like a painting -- bringing it into the scheme of heroic Claudean and Turneresque landscape, the motif framed by arches of trees or cliffs in the foreground, with pictorial incidents unrolling back in space toward the distant peak. So, like all landscape painters, he "improved...
...America plunged into hatred and despair by the Civil War. The morning sun rises through the plume of smoke and ash, irresistibly, its disk made lurid but not extinguished by the subterranean fires, its light mirrored in a tranquil lake. Catastrophe will not wipe out nature; in the foreground of the volcanic plain, new plants spring to life. This, as the art historian David C. Huntington once remarked, is about as close as American painting in the Civil War period ever came to the Battle Hymn of the Republic or the Gettysburg Address...