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Gallery Talk: The Pleasure of Ruins

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What is the appeal of a crumbling arch or a broken pillar? The writer Rose Macaulay wrote in The Pleasure of Ruins: “Ruin is always over-stated; it is part of the ruin-drama staged perpetually in the human imagination, half of whose desire is to build up, while the other half smashes and levels to the earth.” Join Woman’s Board Fellow Alice Boone in exploring these tendencies to what the Germans call ruinenlust, or ruin lust, in the European Paintings galleries.

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