Word: crucifix
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that seizes you. Was there ever a painter less interested in thrusting his "personality" at the viewer? He is the absolute antitype of the hot, expressive artist. His cool gaze settles on everything with equal curiosity: he is as interested in the way a formidable old nun grips her crucifix -- like a weapon -- as in the way the left hand of his monarch Philip IV rests, lightly but not quite negligently, on the hilt of his sword. There is nothing he cannot draw, though no drawings by Velazquez survive. That, however, is part of his fascination to eyes conditioned...
Last year NEA money totaling $45,000 was used by the Corcoran museum for an exhibition by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and by an institution that gave an award to the artist Andres Serrano. One of Serrano's pieces was a photo of a plastic crucifix immersed in the artist's urine -- a fairly conventional piece of postsurrealist blasphemy, which, though likely to have less effect on established religion than a horsefly on a tank, was bound to irk some people. Mapplethorpe's show was to contain some icy, polished and (to most straights and, one surmises, at least...
...porn -- if the show had gone on. But she had in mind, as well, the hope of future grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, which is under criticism for the Mapplethorpe show and for another show that contained Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, the photograph of a crucifix in what the title says is urine. Owr-Chall is said to be yielding to censorship, when she is clearly yielding to political and financial pressure, as Pepsi yielded to commercial pressure over the Madonna...
...budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, which partly subsidized the Mapplethorpe show with a $30,000 grant. The NEA was already enmeshed in controversy over an earlier grant of $15,000 to photographer Andres Serrano, among whose works is a picture titled Piss Christ, depicting a crucifix submerged in the artist's urine. Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in March, produced equally provocative work: his oeuvre includes pictures of nude children in erotic poses, a man urinating into another's mouth, and other violent and homosexually explicit poses. When some of the work was exhibited at New York...
Five, six, grab your crucifix...