Word: modernist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Commentators call him bold, original, experimental, difficult, exciting and funny. He has been praised as a pioneering post-modernist, shouted down as a strident sexist, dismissed as a mere satirist, but he insists that he eludes all simple labels and rejects the legitimacy of categorization...
...general, Salle's work is just a sourer, more hermetic and manually coarser footnote to a long modernist history of montage and quotation that runs from Dada to Pop art -- random citation from the image haze that envelops us, with some T. and A. for signature. Its "relevance" consists only of the accuracy with which it mirrors the inattentiveness of a culture benumbed by television. Its main debts are to James Rosenquist, for the big, juxtaposed image fragments, and to Francis Picabia, for the unassimilated layering of outline images over solid ones in that painter's late, wretchedly bad paintings...
...detailing is exact, the procession of spaces through the 22 new galleries finely modulated and keyed to the contents; where large sculpture needs lots of light and air (plus a whiff of drama), it gets them from a high greenhouse gallery; and where the smaller size of early modernist painting wants a more aedicular and comfortable sense of scale, it gets that...
...work of contemporary artists for the past half-century and that modernism -- early, middle, late and post -- is part of its mandate as an encyclopedic museum. True, up to a point; but its early relations with modern art were never enthusiastic, and during the crucial years in which great modernist collections could still be formed for not much money -- from 1930 to 1965 -- it fudged the issue of commitment. Despite two bequests totaling $250,000 given early in the century by Retailer George A. Hearn for acquiring contemporary American paintings, the Met did not have an active department of contemporary...
...relentlessly inflating prices, the Met will never be able to catch up with MOMA. But its gravitational pull as an institution should not be underestimated. The Met is the greatest general museum in America, and its new wing marks what may be the final phase in the competition for modernist icons. Quite a few of the privately owned works that Lieberman was assumed to have lined up for MOMA at the end of his 34 years of curatorial service there now seem to be pointed at the Met. Over the next few years, the battle of the codicils...