Word: prelapsarian
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...gentle, stiff cadences of Hicks' sermons are at one with the awkwardly tender forms of his paintings: they promise a fulfilled world where the humors are no longer at war, where mind is no longer in conflict with body-in short, an earthly paradise, that fantasy of a prelapsarian Arcadia restored in the wildernesses of the new world. No wonder Hicks looks so quaint in 1975. For 50 years since his "rediscovery," he has been thought to be the best of all American primitive painters whose works survive from the 19th century-not because he was a great instinctive...
...Benton started painting his genre scenes of country American life just at the moment when the industrial metropolis, rather than the land, was turning out to be the central fact of American existence. His vast figure compositions, creaking with every cliché of academic design, bulging with heroic prelapsarian muscle, were balm to a traumatized society. So was his belief in keeping art free of the French, or at any rate foreign, stylistic...
...sees the ideal of Arcadia being identified with an actual landscape. The West was not only a place but a state of imagination, which could invest almost any tract of virgin country between the Appalachians and the Rockies with a kind of epic innocence: nature unspoiled, inhabited by prelapsarian man. One itinerant painter, Worthington Wittredge, met the legendary scout Kit Carson in Santa Fe in 1866. "Nature had made a deep impression on this man's mind," Wittredge observed, "and I could not but think of him standing alone on top of a great mountain far away from...
...prelapsarian receptivity was precious because it removed us from the somewhat distasteful contemporary situation with Mahler. America, in her inimitable megalomania, most recently exhibited for the world's amusement when man's (Americans) first sentence on the moon included the inevitable word "giant," fancies se as rediscovered Mahler, where in fact she only reestablished her own tanuous appreciation of great music. The best biography was written in 1913, two years after his death; the finest single essay was written in 1939 by the excellent English critic Donald Tovey; and all of the great Mahler conductors are either dead, such...