Word: modernist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...painter Giorgio de Chirico died of a heart attack in Rome last week. He was 90, and his death removed one of the last connections between our day and the formative years of modern art. Nearly all who created the modernist vocabulary between 1900 and 1930 are dead. Four remain: Marc Chagall, 91; Joan Mird, 85; Sonia Delaunay, 93; and Salvador Dali, 74. None have produced much work of consequence in recent years; posterity will not have time for late Chagall or post-1939 Dali. Nevertheless, De Chirico's career was so uneven as to have been unique. His impact...
Then, around 1922, he made a complete volte-face. He was only 34 then, and the desire to be an old master seized him; the modernist experiment was too uncertain, and history, he thought, would condemn it. "I have seen," he wrote to André Breton in 1922, "yes, I have finally seen, that terrible things are happening today in painting." Amid hoots of derision from his former surrealist admirers, he marched firmly to the rear guard and took up an irritably defensive stance, maintaining it for the next half-century...
...marshals escorting a small black girl to school in Little Rock, Ark. But these did not represent the essential Rockwell as far as his public was concerned. What they wanted was a friendly world, shielded from the calamities of history and the endemic doubts that are the modernist heritage, set down in detail, painted as an honest grocer weighs ham, slice by slice, nothing skimped; and Norman Rockwell gave it to them for 60 years. He never made an impression on the history of art, and never will. But on the history of illustration and mass communication his mark...
...give the coup de grâce to the lingering idea that abstract expressionism was a "native" movement. On the contrary: it was unimaginable without its source, surrealism. Indeed, it was the last great efflorescence of romantic imagery in art. The New York painters were very selective about the modernist enterprise. They had lived through the Depression and arrived on the edge of a world war. They were not apt to believe in art-induced utopias-the rationalization of mankind through ideal form. So the Bauhaus-constructivist line meant little to them. Surrealism, however, was more congenial. To begin with...
...quality of German visual art has traditionally been downplayed by a Francocentric version of art history, so that-especially for those born between 1930 and 1945- there were relatively few vivid images of a civilized "modernist" Germany to set against the overwhelming iconography of Nazi terror. Now this is changing. "Paris-Berlin" comes hard on the heels of a splendid group of exhibitions mounted in Berlin last fall by the Council of Europe under the general title "Trends of the '20s." They focused on German Dada, on the Bauhaus and its circle, and on international constructivism. "Paris-Berlin" overlaps...