Word: pediments
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...strategies of Claes Oldenburg. What A T & T will eventually make of this high-camp, post-Pop irony performing as status monumentalism is anyone's guess, but that is what Johnson has produced, and the fact is emphasized by the top of the building-the now famous "grandfather clock" pediment with its round operculum, through which the heating system will issue clouds of steam on cold days. This is yet another historicist joke, alluding to one of Johnson's favorites from the past-Boullée, whose vast panoramas of pyramids, masonry globes and smoking crematoria are among the singular documents...
...from Rome that Palladio got his most typical device: the temple-like portico in front of his buildings supporting a triangular pediment. He had seen it on temples like the Pantheon; in an odd but characteristic misapprehension, Palladio guessed that this stately entrance had come from the lost dwellings of antiquity. "I thought it most convenient," he explained, "to begin with the houses of private persons, as thinking it reasonable to believe that these in time gave rise to public edifices." So if the temple was a magnified house, a house could look like a temple. No solution could have...
...debate between form and content, a dead issue for years in Manhattan, still goes on in Chicago. Leon Golub, 49, who is in some ways a father figure to Chicago artists, is entirely preoccupied with the human body. His male nudes, gigantic as marble warriors from a ruined Hellenistic pediment, are quite unclassical despite their constant references to antiquity. The surfaces of trunk and limb are gouged, broken and battered: the act of painting the human image becomes an assault. Rhetorical defects plague his work. But its aim-which is to use the human figure as a unique metaphor...
...monumental form and the strange, universalizing archaism (there are no bombs or guns, only a broken sword; the most modern image in the painting is an electric light, which is also the most ancient, for it becomes a pitiless Mithraic sun) belong more to the world of the Greek pediment and the Roman battle sarcophagus than to that of the Kondor Division, whose bombs demolished Guernica. But it remains a passionate and epic work, and it was Picasso's sole politically effective gesture. The best comment on Picasso's later (and continuing) role as a painter laureate...