Word: positivist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Lager too still aspired to make a positivist art about modern life based on classical principles. A whole range of artists, from Piero della Francesca to Manet, are implicit in his image in praise of skilled labor, The Constructors, 1950. Perhaps the show's most moving and nuanced postwar tribute to sculpture's classical past is Henri Laurens' Morning, 1944. A bronze woman awakening: it ought to be an idyllic image. But it is not, because the massive post-Cubist forms of her limbs suggest stress, a heavy, invisible load to which the energy locked in the figure responds...
...there is a single event in history to which the call to order can be linked, it is World War I. The appalling chaos, the industrialization of death, the grinding of a whole generation into the mud of France by advanced technology -- these spelled an end to positivist fantasies of human progress. And after the carnage of the trenches, who but a cretin or a fascist could echo the futurists' rhetoric about war as the hygiene of civilization? To many artists it must have seemed that picking up the pieces had priority over more fragmentation...
...with my exegetical indoctrinators. I, too, had to take the same smattering of anthropology, economics, political science, and history courses, as well as an introductory statistics course which I yawned my way through in the same clever-clever conviction that learning to think statistically was a positivist vulgarity...