Word: mannerists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...These bearded, stumbling palookas in their peasants' breeches, crushed by the fall of rocks and masonry, are done with literally colossal gusto. The whole windowless chamber seems ready, for a moment, to totter and fall on your head. No room in Italy gives you a clearer sense of the mannerist delight in bizarre illusion. If one could imagine a halfway point between Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes and the gee-whiz delights of Walt Disney, this would...
...them fairly, since he destroyed so much of his early work "to get all that modernist dirt out of my system." But it was abstraction that underwrote the system of Benton's later figurative paintings -- an abstraction based on bulging, serpentine figures derived from Michelangelo. From him, and from mannerist sources like Luca Cambiaso's block figures and El Greco's twisty saints, Benton assembled the theory of kinetic composition that would eventually alter the walls of the Midwest. It would alter abstract painting itself, since his preoccupation with surge and flow got across to Pollock and, much etherealized...
Most vintage Dali was painted before his 35th birthday in 1939. In these canvases, like the familiar The Persistence of Memory, 1931, we are looking down the wrong end of the telescope at a brilliant, clear, shrunken and poisoned world whose deep mannerist perspective and sharp patches of shadow invite the eye but not the body. One could not imagine walking on that stretched, satiny beach among the oozing watches. This atmosphere of voyeurism lent force to Dali's obsessive imagery of impotence, violence and guilt...
...LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM. Snaky vampires! Sexy virgins! Fluorescent caskets! Ken Russell's campfire tale may be more camp than fire, but it shows this unabashed mannerist going for baroque in fine form...
...succubus seductions, the movie starts to look like a man's fearful scenario of woman's seductive power. Is Russell just kidding or deadly serious? The answer is, as always, both. His campfire tale may be more camp than fire, but it shows the cinema's last angry mannerist in good humor and fine form...