Word: modernist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bridges need not be ugly, but with very few exceptions (Detroit's, for instance) they are. At their best, skywalks are bland modernist modules. At their worst, they are like the one that smashes headlong into Minneapolis' quirky turn-of-the-century Egyptian Building, nearly obliterating a carved bas-relief frieze. But aesthetics is not the biggest problem. Skywalks are, in most places most of the time, pseudo-sensible amenities. They are artifacts of an earlier, 1964 World's Fair era, when convenience -- insulation from nature and from the urban hurly-burly -- was the great American goal, neurotically pursued. Skywalks...
Stalin despised it as "decadent bourgeois formalism" and had it locked away. Khrushchev called it excrement and branded its creators "pederasts." Brezhnev ordered bulldozers to smash it into the ground at an outdoor exhibit. Such has been the fate of Russia's modernist art at the hands of dictators bent on enforcing their philistine tastes with the whole armamentarium of the totalitarian state. Even Mikhail Gorbachev has found that the tradition of putting down avant-garde art dies hard among cultural bureaucrats. As a result, the visual arts have been far slower than literature and music to benefit from glasnost...
...longer suppressed, Russian modernist painting emerges in the international market as Sotheby' s holds a $3.6 million sale in Moscow...
Both, too, were profoundly out of fashion for most of the 1970s and '80s, during the era of ferocious antimodernist reaction. But now the pendulum is swinging back again, which may account for this week's eleventh-hour attempt to rehabilitate two modernist reputations at once. Neither prizewinner is interested in making a pretense of mellowness. In the acceptance speech he prepared for his daughter to read, Niemeyer disparaged a "minor architecture made with a ruler and square" and, a bit self-servingly, endorsed the "search for the spectacular." The more plainspoken Bunshaft dismisses apostates and revels in his sense...
...human figure. Born in New York City in 1948, he went to the California Institute for the Arts in Valencia in 1970, just at the height of the belief, then endemic in the American art world, that "painting is dead." Cal Arts epitomized the frivolity of late-modernist art instruction -- no drawing, just do your own thing and let Teacher get on with his. Art education that has repealed its own standards can destroy a tradition by not teaching its skills, and that, broadly speaking, was what happened to figure- painting in America between 1960 and 1980. Fischl...