Word: realist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...some vulgarity creeps in -- well, that's show biz. If you want pure artistry, go to Leningrad and see the Kirov. If you want to explore classicism stretched into infinity, catch the New York City Ballet. What the Bolshoi does best now is Grigorovich's signature ballets, the socialist-realist works like Spartacus and The Golden Age that dramatize episodes in class warfare. The dancers command extraordinary energy and seem in total, avid sympathy with the choreographer. Unfortunately, American audiences may find these mighty pageants simplistic. The silent-film grimaces, the cartoons of good and evil, + the battle cries hurled...
...version is in some ways among the best. One contemplated its arrival with glumness and rancor, and one was wrong. It is still a show with marked ideological prejudices. Clearly, the Whitney curators resist realist painting, and their promotion of media-based conceptual imagery over more directly pictorial forms of intelligence verges on intellectual snobbery (for example, Richard Prince's boringly generic reflections on photo reproduction, or Bruce Nauman's neon pieces, or Barbara Kruger's snootily virtuous samplers bearing such commonplaces as I SHOP THEREFORE I AM). But no one could accuse it of the air-headedness that marked...
...1870s, NEW SOCIAL issues tiedto the emergence of capitalism replaced concernfor the legacy of serfdom, and the realistpainters turned their eye to these new problems.The image of the peasant dominated many canvassesof the period; as Lecturer in History andLiterature Cathy Frierson has pointed out, it wasthe objective of many realist painters to"penetrate and master the peasant soul." IvanKramskoi's portrait, "Mina Moiseev" is the firstwork to confront visitors to the exhibit, and itgives clear insight into the Itinerant painter'sdetermination to study the psychological behaviorof the peasant. Using a restricted palette,Kramskoi does not idealize his subject, and therealism...
Chris Van Allsburg is a magic realist whose haunting illustrations are full of silence and mystery -- perhaps too much mystery for his slender narratives. In The Stranger (Houghton Mifflin; $15.95), 15 autumnal watercolors all but supplant the story of a nameless figure knocked down by a farmer's pickup. He recuperates at the farm, mute but helpful. As long as the mysterious man is present, the farmer's fields stay green, while all around them leaves turn the color of fire. Winter comes only when the stranger departs. Every year thereafter, the frosty windows bear a Delphic message...
...narrative" of the galleries is split in half. On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are -- Daumier, Millet, the Barbizon painters, Fantin-Latour, the rural sentimentalists like Jules Breton, culminating in Courbet at his mightiest (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion). On the right are academic idealism and romanticism, Ingres and his heirs, Delacroix and his, smooth recipes of Grecian flesh...