Word: modernist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...which finishes its run at the Brooklyn Museum this week and will open on April 15 at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Mass., is an exhilarating show. Davis died 14 years ago, but he is still a quintessentially American artist-the hero of the struggle to be both modernist and American that pervaded the art world in the '20s and '30s. No exhibition of his work has ever done as well by him as this one, organized by Art Historian John R. Lane: 113 paintings and drawings, an excellent catalogue text and, for the first time...
...seriousness as an artist and his historical achievement are of very considerable magnitude, and will always invite judgment by the highest standards of modernism. But the work of his old age is not remotely of the same order as the late works of other old men of the modernist mountain-Matisse at 80 with his colored cutouts, the last paintings of Cézanne, Monet's lily ponds. That sense of exaltation, of a long life resolved and its aesthetic structures made luminously explicit, is missing. Instead, we get a lot of dash and gusto, a polymorphous, ill-focused...
...short the main appeal of this record is its blend of musical and lyrical avantgardness. The Head strive for a pop sound that is quirky enough to interest an intellectual audience, and Talking Heads: 77 is truly a modernist product to use the old sales pitch: If you liked Waiting for Godot, you'll love this album. But if you are turned off by the idea of troubled monologues, spoken by a "70s Man" surveying the new vacancy, devoid of the anger that animates a punk like Johnny Rotten, then save your bread. "Q'est-ce que c'est Talking...
...great detail, the show is a dramatic reminder of how vital a contribution Dada and surrealism made to the modernist imagination. No painting or poetry had been so resolutely and bitterly antiauthoritarian. Dada was the child of trauma; the first World War, that cultural chasm, had revealed - in the sheer incapacity of words to convey its degree of lethal absurdity - the extent to which language itself was owned by the officer classes of Europe...
...looked at the summery Atlantic from a jetty in Provincetown, where Motherwell spends his summers. The blues suggest sea, as the black-and-white configurations of the Spanish Elegies evoke doorways, shadows and leather Guardia Civil hats, without in any way violating their essence as modernist painting...