Word: expressionist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Against that, there is the dry and exact pleasure with which Kitaj's paint covers the surface; its luminosity, even its neatness. He is no expressionist-in fact, no one could be further from the mediocre, revivalist splurging that passes for neoexpressionism in Germany and New York these days. Kitaj is very aware of himself, but that awareness (or wariness) presses him toward a detached kind of discourse, a way of painting grounded in tradition. "There are some people who don't like museums because they think of them as tombs, or something negative," he remarked...
...have turned out that way. In the intervening decade, there has been a riotous growth of deliberately clumsy, punkish figurative painting in America: paintings that ignore decorum or precision in the interest of a cunningly rude, expressionist-based diction. Quite clearly, Guston is godfather to this manner, and for this reason his work excites more interest among painters under 35 than that of any of his contemporaries. He would never have gained this following had he stayed abstract, and it is sadly ironic that he died last year, at age 66, shortly after the current retrospective opened in San Francisco...
Then there's Benjamin Pierce, another scanner, who has managed to keep his sanity by expressing his scanner-related anxiety in his sculpture. The scenes at Pierce's exhibition and in his private studio are the film's most powerful moments. Expressionist figures contort and silently scream, communication more about the life of a scanner than the rest of the movie. Cronenberg understands that kind of horror. He can translate the internal and intangible into something real and terrifying...
...film makers. Some of the artists, like Richard Diebenkora, Harry Callahan or Ellsworth Kelly, are very well known and represented by first-class work. Others, like Willem de Kooning, are equally famous but showing weak things. Still others, such as the New York Artist Julian Schnabel (with his lumpen-expressionist jumbles of sticky paint and broken crockery), are immensely fashionable with collectors for reasons the work does not make clear. But nobody, not even the most dedicated footslogger on the SoHo treadmill, could have known everything in these three shows firsthand. Taken together, they make one realize yet again...
...speak, an insult to the collective. "My aim is to be understood by everyone," Grosz wrote in 1925. "I reject the 'depth' that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a veritable diving bell crammed with cabalistic crap and intellectual metaphysics. This expressionist anarchy has got to stop...