Word: stiff
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...opened last week at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. One, "Paintings by New England Provincial Artists, 1775-1800," organized by Art Historian Nina Fletcher Little, illustrates the limner tradition with 76 paintings by 34 artists, backed up with domestic objects of the sort that appears in those stiff, poignant effigies-chairs, painted floorcloths, a child's coral-garnished silver whistle. The other show, "Copley, Stuart, West," deals with the first three American-born painters to escape from this matrix and enter the European arena in order to become, in the full sense of the word, professional artists...
...bilateral exchange agreements with the mainland regime. A certain amount of stupidity was also involved. Canada massively miscalculated the outcry that would follow its ultimatum; had Ottawa foreseen the uproar, it would probably have brought the issue to a head much earlier and backed down when resistance got stiff. What Ottawa did instead was continually to cite its original pledge to welcome all competing countries "pursuant to the normal regulations." This interpretation of Canada's laws regulating foreign visitors has allowed Ottawa's officials to justify the stance they have now taken...
...public Pat Nixon projected a stiff, almost plastic image-one that served well to conceal her inner anguish. Intimates say it also obscured a warmth and liveliness enjoyed only by those who knew her offstage. Yet her ordeal was obviously great as her husband, in the twilight of his presidency, lied to the public-and apparently even to his family-about the Watergate cover-up and was forced out of office. Most humiliating in more recent days was the Bob Woodward-Carl Bernstein description of a cold Nixon marriage, her consideration of divorce in 1962, her seeking solace in drink...
...mannequins in department-store windows traditionally are posed in attitudes of stiff propriety. But a countertrend is under way at some fashionable stores, spurred by young window dressers who group their figures to enact little immobile dramas of sex, bizarre fantasy, even suicide-just about anything that will make a jaded passer-by stop and look. Explains Candy Pratts, 26-year-old window designer for Bloomingdale's in New York: "You've got to reach anybody who walks...
...exhibition is rich with detail. One realizes, with fresh interest, how cramped the visual resources of Jefferson's Virginian education must have been; his own remark on local architecture in 1781, that "the first principles of the art are unknown," is borne out in other fields by the stiff, crude society portraits of the young colony. The show traces the neoclassical ideal forming in Jefferson's ideals and tastes-the growing certainty that republicanism was a function of natural law, that a new age of civic virtue was dawning and that an art of reasoned severity and correct...