Word: expressionist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Depression, Welles introduced the cinema of melancholy. With Citizen Kane--a tale of power and love, and the loss of both--American film found the dark, seductive side of its own success story. For the next decade, domestic dramas, spy pictures and detective thrillers would be shrouded in expressionist shadows and shot with oblique camera angles. Kane's multiple-narrator format announced that no one was to be trusted with the whole truth; the camera could lie too, and we would have to decide whether to believe it. Welles dragged the movies into modernism, with sequences that keep playing...
Bacon utterly rejects this view. He sees himself not as an expressionist but as a realist who nevertheless stakes the outcome of his art on an opposition between intelligence (ordering, remembering, exemplifying) and sensation. His paintings do not strive to tell stories, but to clamp themselves on the viewers' nervous system and offer, as he puts it, "the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance." He once remarked: "An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a nonillustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact...
...will have altered; some popular reputations will seem as obviously ridiculous -- though as sociologically interesting -- as the former cult of such late 19th century artists as Bougereau or Hans Makart. But whether there is any real genius in the offing is a moot point. America has no major younger expressionist artist, like Germany's Anselm Kiefer or England's Frank Auerbach. Though it has some gifted realist painters, notably William Bailey and Neil Welliver, none can be said to compare, in point of intensity and unsparing intelligence, with England's Lucien Freud or Spain's Antonio Lopez Garcia...
...Doubtless this list will change if he tries a ceiling, but Schnabel has never learned to draw; in graphic terms, his art has barely got beyond the lumpy pastiches of Max Beckmann and Richard Lindner he did as a student in Houston. The dull, uninflected megalomania of his kitsch- expressionist imagery (Sex, Death, God and Me) is rant, a bogus "appropriation" of profundity...
...graduate of the Cornell College of Architecture, Art and Planning, Meier did some painting during his early years, turning out large abstract-expressionist canvases. Nowadays he assembles intricate collages ("my workout"), and his architectural drawings are collectors' items. He also cuts an impressive figure in person. With his dark-rimmed glasses and conservative suits, offset by a flowing white mane, he looks as though he had designed himself...