Word: expressionist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...novelizing occasionally ticks on reflexively when there seems to be nothing in particular on his mind. So with Bluebeard, whose hero is a wealthy, one-eyed old man named Rabo Karabekian, a magazine illustrator in his youth, then a soldier during World War II, then, briefly, an acclaimed abstract expressionist painter. There is a random quality to this history: Why one- eyed? Why a painter and not a cellist? Rabo's recollections are wistful and charming, but vaporous. The graceful pages are a gifted author's daydreams, but they never coalesce into a novel...
...Robert Fulton with his steam engine. Ruckus America is all one big pop-up book, done in an impressively resourceful, oompahing parade of stylistic parodies: corn-pone cubism, red- neck deco. The way buildings splay and their ground cants toward the viewer comes straight out of German expressionist cinema...
...those lines and curves are all about. At one time, a decent knowledge of classical mythology and the Bible was enough to understand what a painter was up to. Today, even an encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary art can fail to inform the art-hungry heiress what her new Abstract Expressionist masterpiece is supposed to express...
...Angeles has some of the best private collections in America. These include the scholarly and fastidiously chosen group of 19th century American paintings assembled over the past two decades by Jo Ann and Julian Ganz Jr.; Robert Rifkind's superb conspectus of German expressionist paintings, sculpture, prints and posters, remarkable for its depth and its number of first-rate works by unfamiliar names as well as obvious greats; the collections of post-1945 American art put together by Robert Rowan, Marcia Weisman and her ex-husband Frederick Weisman; anthologies of big-ticket contemporary work bought in a few years...
Quite often the works that seem most "expressionist," the clearest indexes of a mind approaching the end of its tether, are the most tenderly scrupulous in their treatment of fact. One has only to go to Saint-Remy and stand on the edge of the olive grove outside the asylum, looking south toward the chain of limestone hills called the Alpilles, to realize that Van Gogh changed nothing essential in the view when painting Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background in the spring of 1889. The heaving stratification of the limestone, its caverns and holes, and the turbulent...