Word: mask
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...models breezing down Giorgio Armani's glass-topped runway were having too much fun to put on the mannequin's usual mask of boredom. It was a celestial fashion parade: zephyr-light chiffon shorts worn with a billowing shirt and slightly askew man's tie; immaculately tailored jackets with saucy miniskirts; poolside playsuits that looked as if they might evaporate at any moment. The international crowd of buyers and press applauded throughout the show, the highlight of last week's spring collections in Milan, and at the end stood to cheer the creator of all these...
...reason, Rubin argues, was that modernism used primitivism when it needed to, and not before. A Fang mask or a Kota funerary effigy would have been useless to an impressionist, whose ambition was to render perceptual reality as faithfully as possible. But the drift of fauvism and especially cubism was toward the conceptual: and here the idea of representing, say, a face as a flat plane with knoblike eyes and a cylindrical funnel of a mouth was infinitely suggestive. Certainly it was convenient for Picasso to rejig the human face in terms of bladelike noses and scarification lines...
...African works did not need to be masterpieces of their own style. The face of Matisse's Portrait of Madame Matisse, 1913, possibly one of the dozen greatest portraits of the 20th century, was based on a mediocre Fang mask from Gabon. Sometimes, though, a modernist work would take off from an African object of the first rank. Such was the case with Picasso's bronze of Marie-Therese Walter, 1931, whose erotically swollen blimp of a nose is based on an effigy he owned of the fertility goddess Nimba from the Baga. The sight of these...
...were on the island. "We knew the missiles were there," said Rusk. "The President had a desk full of photos. I'm sure Gromyko knew. He was doing what Moscow told him to do." Rusk took him to dinner that fateful October night, and Old Grom's mask remained impenetrable through vodka, wine and cognac...
Reversibility is crucial. One wants to be native only for a time. The true holiday requires metamorphosis, but, even more important, return to normality. Return is what distinguishes excursion from exile. If the change of persona becomes irreversible-if the Mardi Gras mask becomes permanently, grotesquely stuck-holiday turns to horror. One must be able to go home...