Word: prometheus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...PROMETHEUS: THE LIFE OF BALZAC by AndréMaurois. 573 pages. Harper...
...Maurois, an old hand at literary biographies (Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Dumas, Hugo, Proust), disavows that intention. "This is a life of Balzac, not a critical study," he says in a foreword and, having passed his 80th year, announces that it is the last biography he will write. Nevertheless, Prometheus is strewn with the kind of judgments that a disciple makes at the feet of the master: "A super-novelist," "the greatest novelist of the century." Balzac's very faults become virtues: "The enforced disorder" of his life "reproduces the disorder of life" itself...
Died. Paul Manship, 80, front-ranking U.S. sculptor, widely acclaimed for his heroic-sized, neoclassic figures (notably, the 15-ft. Prometheus in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center), but also for finely wrought bronze medals (World War II's Merchant Marine Medal) and busts (Franklin D. Roosevelt); of a heart attack; in Manhattan...
...JUNE PAIK, 33, a Korean, is a devotee of Composer John Cage, and his primary ambition was to compose far-out sounds. Electronic music inspired him to make electronic art, just as the Russian composer Scriabin made a motorized light display to accompany his Prometheus half a century ago. Now living in New York City, Paik buys up old television sets, scrambles the images they receive with electromagnetic coils and magnets. The results are a vertigo of discombobulated images, an early show of what kinetic art might become. "There are 4,000,000 dots per second on one TV screen...
Like Saint Joan, it is a play about Catholicism and heresy, among other things. Could it be that the theme of religious faith inspired him to outdo himself? It is undeniable that, over the years, this theme has stimulated playwrights to remarkable and frequently their best work-from Prometheus Bound, Antigone and The Bacchae through Tartuffe, Athalie, Faust and Brand to Easter, Partage de Midi, Murder in the Cathedral, Galileo, Billy Budd, A Sleep of Prisoners, and Waiting for Godot...