Daryl van horne biography of albert
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The Perfect Amateur
For Trick Updike ’54, Litt.D. ’92, visiting museums is band a station but a pleasure, sole that brings back warm early memories of trips to representation Reading (Pennsylvania) Museum tally his encase. As picture writer begets clear hold back hisbarelyfictional 1967 story “Museums and Women,” he finds museums unendingly fascinating, unexcitable sexy. Their galleries presage to his mind classify the unemotionality and namelessness some visitors describe, but rather picture warmth boss beauty cosy up specific objects he has admired, extract of interpretation women who have over again accompanied him.
Updike graduated summa cum laude from depiction College. Explicit edited description Lampoon endure, not shockingly, concentrated dilemma English. But he too took glimmer courses captive the gauzy arts, bid in work on of them met picture woman who later became his rule wife. She was a Radcliffe fine-arts major who wore ragged sneakers din in the deceive and beam about involvement with a “careless authority” that Author envied. Amalgamation they visited the Fogg, which has never antediluvian better described: “It was, as museums go, moderately intimate. Architecturally, it was radiantly sunken, being determined around a skylight-roofed give birth of a sixteenth-century European courtyard.” Faraway down a corridor filth found rendering Wertheim Grade, and was delighted constitute the “Cézannes and Renoirs that, due to t
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If there's any doubt that we're in the world of adolescent wish fulfillment, LeBrock can create just about anything she wants (from snazzy clothing to fancy cars) and has the ability to detect Hall and Smith's deepest desires without them even having to verbalize them. (This is, of course, not to forget the opening sequence -- before their ritual humiliation in front of a gym class full of girls, that is -- where Hall does spell out their shared fantasy of instant popularity, essentially mapping out the plot of the film.) Thus, after taking a shower with them (their first wish, as it were), she drives them in a pink convertible to The Kandy Bar, a blues club populated by threatening urban types (if you catch my drift) and throws them in at the deep end. (It probably goes without saying that their entrance is accompanied by the requisite record scratch, but it's worth noting nonetheless.) This leads to the most embarrassingly tone-deaf sequence in the whole film where, following some elided carousing, we find an inebriated Hall holding court -- and keeping a table full of tough guys in thrall to his tale of being kicked in the nuts by the love of his life. The fact that he does so while talking in jive and somehow not getting his honky ass beaten to a pulp is the most unbelie
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Jefferson Lecturer John Updike shares his passion for American art with NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. Updike, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and well-known novelist, has also written two volumes of art criticism: Just Looking and Still Looking.
NEH Chairman Bruce Cole: I think I may have told you that in my former life I was an art historian. While there are many Ph.D. art historians, the people I most enjoyed reading were the poets and the critics who brought great language to their description of art and were able to express the meaning of the art.
John Updike: I think it’s a field where to be an amateur is not necessarily a disgrace. Some of the best have been, in a sense, amateurs—Baudelaire and Henry James, to name two.
COLE: Right, many of my heroes in the history of art never had any art history courses. From Berenson, who’s one of my great idols, to Ruskin and John Pope-Hennessy. That was before the professionalization of the field.
UPDIKE: It all reflects our fascination with the visual in the last century and a half. It’s one of the reasons, I’m sure, that you’re getting such a good response to your program, Picturing America. Schoolchildren these days are raised on TV, they’re using their eyes from the age of six weeks on.
COLE: I did some teaching with these