Word: modernists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...single art event symbolized Russia's thawed relations to its own modernist past, it was the show at the Tretyakov Art Gallery in Moscow last winter by a painter and mystic who died in 1935, well into the Stalin era, and whose work remained buried for decades thereafter: Kasimir Malevich...
Born in Kiev in 1878, Malevich invented himself with astonishing speed. Between 1905, the year he moved to Moscow, and 1915, he ran through the gamut of early modernist styles, from pointillism to cubism. Early works like Floor Polishers, 1911-12, show his assimilative powers: this gripping image of hard labor, where every line reinforces the muscular twist of bodies and the thrust of the feet with their waxing pads on the floor, ultimately derives from Matisse's Dance. Troglodytic, pious and massive, Malevich's figures of peasants from the '20s both assert modernity and deny...
...past. From the emergence of Giotto in the 13th century to the death of Bernini in the 17th, Italian painters and sculptors ruled the European roost, setting the standards of achievement by which Western culture judged itself. By the 19th century this primacy was lost, and throughout the modernist era Italy produced no equivalents to Picasso, Matisse or Mondrian, and, of course, nothing even faintly comparable to Titian or Michelangelo...
While he calls himself a modernist, Holl has conscientiously learned backward-looking lessons about building scale. "Buildings in general are too big," he says. "I'm happy doing houses and buildings a bit bigger than houses." The two largest projects Holl has designed, a planned addition to the University of Minnesota/Twin Cities School of Architecture and a West Berlin library extension, would each be only about a tenth as big as a modest skyscraper...
...only a modernist reading of the artist's role makes it seem contradictory that Goya was both a court artist and an inspired, tragic social critic. Efforts to see him in pop-Marxist terms as "an artist of the people" miss the point. Goya had many disillusioned moments, and by the last years of his life, when -- sick and old and bitterly disappointed by the betrayal of the liberal Spanish constitution at the hands of that squat reactionary King, Fernando VII -- he moved to France, they became a continuous pessimism. He never idealized the Spanish proletariat: it was el populacho...