May 29 2013 May 30 201313 "Prisoner of Light," the Matta masterpiece that leads Christie's two-day auction of Latin-American art (May 29-30), dates from 1941, the year the artist abandoned the embattled European continent for New York; flashes of color, like meteorites streaking across an inky sky, suggest the conflagrations of war.
The Republic and the Constitution rose again, phoenixlike, from the conflagration of civil war, but President Lincoln did not — Booth made certain of that.
But by the time the conflagration of World War I has put an end to the Hapsburg empire, the bloodshed in this Galician town on Easter Sunday 1914 has faded into insignificance.
While the objects suggest the heights to which a new, acutely formal kind of imagination could rise, the paintings bespeak the spiritual anxiety of eminent citizens and celebrities who all too soon would be engulfed by the conflagration of World War I.
The last time such narcissistic themes appeared en masse in Western culture was during the late 19th century Decadent movement, just before Europe collapsed into the conflagration of World War I. Decadent novels like Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray portrayed self-absorbed aesthetes who cared only for their external appearances, using them as cover to commit the ugliest of crimes.
About 60 million perished in a global conflagration of total warfare.
Playing Both Sides In Lebanon's Civil War The conflagration of 1973 was barely extinguished when the next crisis erupted, in Lebanon.
Internationally, Capek was relegated to the status of an entre deux guerres writer; he had not experienced World War II, the great conflagration of the West, and thus could seem irrelevant to Cold War concerns.
A hundred years ago this past August, Europe exploded in a conflagration that came to engulf the world in a new kind of war.
That killing led to the declaration of war by Austria-Hungary on Serbia and prompted a worldwide conflagration.
"War" is a fuzzy category, shading from global conflagrations to neighborhood turf battles, so the organizations that track the frequency and damage of war over time need a precise yardstick.
