Word: expressionist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...past couple of weeks the international museum world has been getting an increasing attack of the jitters over two works by the Austrian Expressionist artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918). Portrait of Wally, 1912, and Dead City III, 1911, were part of a large fall show of Schiele's drawings and paintings at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, all on loan from the government-financed Leopold Foundation in Vienna. The two paintings have long been claimed by descendants of Viennese Jewish families from whom the Nazis stole them in the 1930s. Right at the end of the show--in fact...
...most radical departure in postwar American art was undoubtedly Jackson Pollock's drip painting--those skeins and lashes of pigment falling on the canvas with uncanny grace and energy. But his fellow Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning (1904-97) brought into painting a new sense of the contradictions of American culture and made erotic poetry out of them. De Kooning, the "slipping glimpser," as he called himself, was open to a constant stream of momentary impressions: smiles from Camel ads, shoulders from Ingres, pinups and Raphael--high and low, everywhere. In this way he became a bridge to a younger...
After Pop and side by side with it came impersonality--Minimalism, conceptual art and a vanguardist belief in the death of painting. But the artist who did most to break the mold of late-Modernist formalism in the '70s was a former Abstract Expressionist, Philip Guston (1913-80). His work over that decade redefined the terms of painting for a whole generation of young Americans, opening up the possibilities of the painted figure once more. In their time, Guston's paintings seemed like a kind of treason to the high-minded refusals of late Modernism, but therein lay their newness...
...Kooning died last week at the age of 92, it did not come as a surprise; he had succumbed to senile dementia years before, and a sort of deathwatch had settled over the art world as it observed, at a distance, the slow sinking of the last Abstract Expressionist. Now they were all definitively gone, the artists who put American art on the world map after 1945: Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and the transplanted Dutchman who jumped ship into the New World in 1926 and settled in New York as an illegal alien. Fortunately...
Some background on the show's sources helps explain its weirdness. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is based on a silent 1920 German Expressionist film of the same name about a mysterious hypnotist who enters a German town and causes all manner of horror and havoc. The film, in turn, draws upon the work of a curious theater of the time based in Paris called the Grand Guignol. For over six decades, the Guignol produced plays resembling a grotesque puppet show, but with live actors. Real-life crime and bawdiness were brought to the stage for elite audiences craving campy...