Word: modernists
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Architect Eero Saarinen's description of the castle at Brandeis University as "Mexican Ivanhoe" [Nov. 19] reminds me of Sinclair Lewis' equally unkind characterization of modernist structures as "glass-fronted hen-houses." The castle (see cut) was designed by my father, Dr. John Hall Smith, founder of Middlesex University, to house the classrooms and laboratories of its School of Medicine. More befitting the medieval grandeur of our castle are the lines of Wordsworth...
...environment and was not very articuate or self conscious about his art. This led Rodman back to the U.S. and Ben Shahn whom he felt in his work answered the questions "How can the popular artist be reconciled with the long history of art? And how can the knowing modernist achieve the primitive's rapport with his own environment? Shahn," says Rodman, "consciously out of a painful apprenticeship to the centuries of Western painting had managed somehow to devise an expert means of simple communication--"Obin (the Haitian) could not tell me why or how he did anything. Shahn...
...check for one painting, a leader of Ft. Worth's oiligarchy reserved another four paintings, and U.S. museums hurried to get in bids. Focus of all the excitement: Mexican Muralist and Painter Rufino Tamayo, 56, today hailed in his own land as Mexico's modernist número...
Died. Marie Laurencin, 72, topflight French modernist painter, famed for her wispy, pastel-toned portraits of doe-eyed young girls in diaphanous gowns; of a heart attack; in Paris. Prim, red-haired Painter Laurencin tried three times to enter Paris' famed Ecole des Beaux Arts, was coldly blocked. Critics labeled her early work "decadent" and "ugly." After World War I, she changed her style, was later described as the only considerable figure who painted like a woman. ("Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier...
Died. Lyonel Feininger, 84, topnotch U.S. modernist painter; in Manhattan. New York-born Feininger went to Germany in 1887 to study music, turned to painting instead, exhibited in 1913 with the Blue Rider group (Klee, Kandinsky, Franz Marc), taught painting and graphic arts at Walter Gropius' Bauhaus from 1919 to 1933. Influenced by cubism, he illumined dark, glowing abstractions of sailboats (a famed one: Glorious Victory of the Sloop Maria), churches and city scenes with the placement of crystal-like shafts of light...