Word: miniaturist
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Because he so consistently favored straight talk over polemics and specific details over abstractions, White has been dismissed in some quarters as a miniaturist a little too long on charm and short on substance. It is true that big ideas seldom engaged him unless they could be broken down into parts that made clear and common sense. His response to the hue and cry for loyalty oaths during the Communist witch hunts in the early 1950s was typical. He ignored ideology and compressed the body politic into a single form: "If a man is in health, he doesn't need...
...they never decay into nostalgia. Schwitters was a lyrical genius, a Persian miniaturist of the modern city street, confecting icons of junk under the eye of strict formal abstraction. One would expect the number of small pieces in this show to be, in the end, fatiguing; but it is not, thanks to Schwitters' dedication to reinventing a surface with each collage. His favorite matrix was the grid of cubism, a shallow, divided skin on which the scraps of paper and little objects surface and vanish, overlapping like leaves on a forest floor. He called them all "Merz" constructions: the name...
When Erté settled in Paris in 1912 at the age of 19, he had already developed a taste for the precise detail, blazing colors and stylized but highly idiosyncratic motifs that are characteristic of 16th century Persian miniaturist painting. He also had a flair for attracting the eye of celebrated clients, including Mata Hari, the Dutch dancer executed by the French as a German...
...such influences are melded into a wholly modernist idiom. Hodgkin does to the Indian miniature what Matisse did to Islamic decoration; the source is not simply quoted but transformed. The miniaturist's precision of edge and line is replaced by a fuzzy, affable kind of formal system-nursery-toy versions, almost, of the sphere, cube and cylinder, those intimidating Platonic solids of programmatic modernism. His pigment, however, has an extraordinary range of effect. His work sports in the transparency, density and sweet pastiness that only oil paint can give. Surfeited by color, twinkling with fields of dots (like enlarged...
...work drew criticism as well as accolades. Although his career began to flourish in the 1930s, he never joined arms with the social realists who dominated that decade or subverted his art to ideology. His devotion to the short story provoked some to label him a mere miniaturist. Others were irked by his continued attention to the kind of characters who, as in The Worm in the Apple, "got richer and richer and richer and lived happily, happily, happily, happily." Only the tin-eared could miss the irony of that description. Cheever's people are imprisoned, often comically...