Word: modernist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Adams' photographs are too thoughtful and rigorous to be called nostalgic. But some of their poignancy comes from the paradox of their making. The replicated image and its mechanical multiplication of fact slowly wore down 19th century romanticism and moved irony to the center of modernist culture. The camera, as Critic Susan Sontag pointed out, makes us tourists, not just in Yosemite, but within all reality. With Adams, however, the camera became the romantic's last defense. There was no irony. What you felt?scrupulously and with great technical skill?is what...
...also disliked the canonical painters of the American sublime, Bierstadt and Moran. "Indians and bears walking out to the edge of cliffs!" he snorts. "They'd paint the Half Dome as though it were chewing gum. No essence, no spirit?just scene painting." Adams' problem was to find a modernist vision in photography, one that corresponded to the postimpressionist avantgarde, whose works he had glimpsed at the San Francisco Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915. In 1930 he saw that vision in the work of a photographer twelve years his senior, Paul Strand...
...produced in Russia before, during and for ten years after the Revolution of 1917 was the last great efflorescence of the modernist spirit that is still not fully known about. This was partly due to the cold war. The main reason, however, was repression inside the Soviet Union. The work of artists like Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova, Natalya Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Vladimir Tallin, Kasimir Malevich, Natan Altman, Naum Gabo and scores of others was a collectively ecstatic response to the possibilities of a new world, the Utopia that Lenin called "Marx plus electricity." It was international in range...
...There has never been a chance for anyone, in or out of the Soviet Union, to see this great subject treated in such depth. It is designed, in the words of the catalogue, as "the last panel of the triptych" of exhibitions illustrating the relationships between Paris and three modernist capitals: New York (1977), Berlin (1978) and Moscow. The sheer size of the Soviet loan-some 2,000 works in all media, from paintings to agitprop posters, from architectural drawings to teacups and chess sets-put the center's director, Pontus Hulten, at a disadvantage in bargaining. The Russian...
...meant to encourage agitprop poster design. The artists, however, took it as a stamp of approval for cubo-futurism, suprematism, constructivism and the other isms that the ferment of Western art had helped set off. In their enthusiasm to create a new culture that would be a synthesis of modernist fragmentation, folk art and dialectical materialism, the artists got more from looking at Lenin's works than he did from theirs. "I do not understand them," Lenin complained. "I do not experience any pleasure from them...