Word: philip
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...might be expected from someone who began her career on the Boston-Cambridge open-mike circuit, Williams also uses her voice for protest as well as for emotional expression, as in the tune "I Had No Right," which tells the story of '60s anti-war radicals Daniel and Philip Berrigan. But perhaps the overriding theme on this album is one of renewal. In "Spring Street" Williams confides her battle with uptown pretensions and affirms that she'll push [herself] up through the dirt and shake [her] petals free. In each sentiment expressed in The Green World, Dar Williams has surely...
...Fogg revisits the work that shocked the art world in 1970 with an exhibition of Philip Guston's (gasp!) figurative paintings
When I first saw Philip Guston's delightfully cartoonish paintings as a kid-that is, the paintings he made during and after the 1970s, the ones he is most remembered for-I thought, quite succinctly, "Cute!" At the time, it seemed to me that Guston's motley crew of regular characters-pointy, cone-headed creatures with endearing toaster-slit eyes, big cycloptic heads, crudely drawn shoes and other everyday paraphernalia-operated in and seemed privy to a very special world, impervious to the scrutiny of cynical adult types. The muteness of these things held a sort of infinite communicability...
Alas, childhood's innocence was bound to end sometime, and, as a mature visitor to the Fogg's exhibit Philip Guston: A New Alphabet (and new devotee of museum wall-text and peripheral literature), I was taken aback to discover that Guston's coneheads are, in fact, Ku Klux Klan members, that the cycloptic heads (not shown in this exhibition) are representations of a bedridden Guston himself, that the fairy-tale sphinx of "Nile" (1977) is an ailing wife. Symbolic, after all. But, as Guston reminisces in the excellent film documentary of his career, A Life Lived (1980), on view...
...equipment proved a bold move indeed. Completely renouncing non-figurative art at a time when non-figurative art was considered the only right thing to do earned Guston brutal criticism, and his pivotal 1970 show at the Marlborough Gallery was almost universally reviled. Co-curator Harry Cooper writes, "Philip Guston's exhibition at Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1970 was the art world's last true, unpackaged sensation." Dramatic statements aside, it truly was something of a sensation, and a life-altering event-as Guston recounted in 1980, even long-time friends stopped speaking to him in the aftermath...