Word: formalists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in New York. But I refused, it was humiliating for me to take part in a spectacle Like that. I was a formalist, a representative of an antinational direction in music. My music was banned, and now I was supposed to go and say that everything was fine. Finally I agreed. People sometimes say that it must have been an interesting trip, look at the way I'm smiling in the photographs. That was the smile of a condemned man. I felt Like a dead man. I answered all the idiotic questions...
...between one figure and another, how much emptiness should come between a silhouette in a bar and the profile of a metal letter, and how to maintain a kind of iconic austerity in an impure medium that could easily become cluttered with props and set dressing. Segal is no formalist, but his sense of the abstract underpinning of sculpture cuts down on what might otherwise have become a tough-but-tender street sentimentality. He is, as the catalogue suggests, a "proletarian mythmaker," though not in a political sense; and no other sculptor working in America today has done more...
...repression had begun. In Stalin's slow and terrible eye, such art was decadent and, because of its internationalism, bourgeois-formalist. The Gulag swallowed some artists, like Boris Kushner. Others, such as Larionov, Goncharova, Gabo and Ivan Puni, went into exile. Those who stayed, like Rodchenko or the architect Konstantin Melnikov, survived as ghosts, forgotten men in a culture of vindictive Stalinist toadies. Like Cronus, the Revolution devoured its children. As a wholesale trashing of a civilization, only Hitler's demolition of the German modernists compares with it. Inside the Soviet Union, the works themselves lay buried, invisible...
...exalting the density and plurality of "everyday" architecture above the singleness of the Modernist ideal, Venturi's ideas joined up with the Pop movement, which by 1966 had already peaked in America. Venturi was roundly damned for this by Modernist critics, as Pop painting had been damned by formalist critics seeking to preserve the "purity" of canonical, Greenberg-style color abstraction. But young architects and architecture students thought otherwise; by the early 1970s Venturi, who had built very few buildings, had attracted a considerable following as a theorist and critic...
...believe in art-induced utopias-the rationalization of mankind through ideal form. So the Bauhaus-constructivist line meant little to them. Surrealism, however, was more congenial. To begin with, it was an art of subject matter; and although platoons of later critics would discuss abstract expressionism in purely formalist terms, the painters themselves were obsessed by content. "We assert," said Mark Rothko, "that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless." His "we" included Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, William Baziotes, Theodores Stamos and, in greater or lesser degrees, all the abstract expressionists...