Word: modernistic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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MacLeish took a more workmanlike view of the art of writing poetry than most of his contemporary poets and critics. He questioned what he saw as romantic and modernist assumptions that all art must be subjective and original, writing 1932 that the task of contemporary poets was to "fix momentarily or for many generations the aspect of the world we see. It is enough to do that and to do it with self-forgetfulness and humanity...
...gargantuan bricoleur, a user-up of discarded things, a collagist in three dimensions. His work touched base with the fundamental modernist movements, seizing and transforming something from each of them. From cubism and constructivism came the planar organization of form and the abstract language; from surrealism, the sense of encounter with a "personage," as basic to his work as it was to Miró's. Given enough found metal, he could launch into runs of astonishing inventiveness, like a jazz virtuoso improvising on a phrase. This happened most notably in 1962, when he was invited to make a sculpture...
There is no attempt to describe or delineate a house style, to demonstrate how a gown by Worth might be designed or constructed differently from a gown by Paquin. Paul Poiret, one of the first modernist dress designers, is represented in this show by five pieces, but anything that made Poiret daringly innovative is smothered here in the general ambience. In this great age of squeeze, tie and whalebone, Poiret even made dresses to be worn without corsets, but this idea, and all others, goes unremarked by the exhibitors. They busy themselves instead compiling identifications for each garment that list...
...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...
Some may find such imagery not merely archaic but positively oldfashioned: invocations of the chthonic and the primitive have been standard modernist fare for three-quarters of a century. But Bourgeois uses her primitive quotations to get past the conventional groupings of modern art history-the litter of isms that tells us so little about the real meanings of art-and to rummage painfully between the layers of her own makeup. What equivalents can art find for depicting femaleness from within, as distinct from the familiar conventions of looking at it from outside through the eyes of another sex? What...