Word: modernist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...littoral was changed from a place to an idea by the efforts of painters, this one was it. Paul Cezanne, a Provencal rooted in the limestone and red clay of his native Aix, had made backcountry Provence around Mont Ste.-Victoire one of the sacred loci of the modernist imagination. Among them, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard would do the same for the coast...
...lingering suspicion that between 1916 and 1930, even average Matisses got as complacent as most Renoirs. Indeed, some of Matisse's greatest work was done in those years. Why was this acknowledged so grudgingly, or not at all? For "ideological reasons," Co-Curator Fourcade argues, springing from a "modernist obsession" with Matisse's largely posthumous role as prophet of Paris-New York abstraction. If you assume that art history culminates in abstract art, then you may feel betrayed if your hero's work goes from flatness to depth, from a space built from blocks of color to one evoked...
...comers' neomodern bent is ironic, given who advised MacNair in selecting the final 40: Philip Johnson and Robert A.M. Stern. Grandmaster Johnson, 80, is the most notorious ex-modernist in the world; Stern, a sort of architectural Ralph Lauren, specializes in exactly the sort of direct 19th century-style borrowing that his younger peers are eschewing. This year's "40 Under 40" honors list is the third that Stern, 47, has helped compile (and the first of the three on which he has not appeared). Being named is no guarantee of a successful career, obviously, but a remarkable number...
...without a bit of frippery. W.G. Clark and Charles Menefee have accomplished their own unlikely feat with the cool, cool Middleton Inn: here are glass houses that delight as glass houses have not delighted in a generation. Overlooking a South Carolina river, the inn boasts rooms that are perfect modernist compositions: light, airy, lively, serene. Clark and Menefee's work, like most of the best work by younger Americans today, is all about restraint in the face of lush temptation and few stylistic rules. When anything goes, less is more interesting...
...neoexpressionist but of a virtuoso; his drawing lacks the tenacity of an Eakins, let alone a Cezanne, yet it was drawing of a high order, heartless sometimes, but rarely less than dazzling in its fluency; and there is nothing like it in American art today. Sargent was certainly no modernist, but the fiercely competitive atelier system of figure drawing that formed his style when he studied with Carolus-Duran in Paris also underpinned the high standards of early modernist draftsmanship in Matisse, Picasso or Beckmann. Hence, though his relation to the avant-garde was nil, he is no longer...