evanesce

While former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo famously predicted that the Westway controversy, as feverish as it was, would eventually evanesce “like a walnut in the batter of eternity,” each of Mr. Butzel’s successful legal challenges to preserve the Hudson River would reverberate beyond current events.

Not for these reveling lovers the swelling strings of Henry Mancini, who scored the film; in the cocktail-mixing song “Evanesce,” Guettel gives them bright, fast music, frenetic and danceable — and when they do a bit of soft-shoe in salt spilled on the floor, there’s a playful heedlessness to their sandpaper percussion.

These feature watery pools of color that seem to evanesce into nothing, topped by the hard geometries of Gray’s rug patterns, which are rendered in hand-stitched embroidery.

His later “wedge” sculptures, slender prisms of color that can reach heights of 8 feet, seemed to evanesce into transparent nothingness at the top.

In the handful of works by Vuillard, both the abstract patterning and the absence of modeling cause the borders between the picture’s separate elements to evanesce.