Word: antimodernists
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...conservative, antimodernist poets invented a literary working-class hero?a garage mechanic who composed surrealist verse, which his creators stitched together from snippets of Shakespeare, a dictionary and a U.S. Army report on mosquito control. They submitted the works of "Ern Malley" to Angry Penguins, a respected literary journal in Adelaide, intending to ridicule the unclothed emperor of modern poetry. Their joke had a bitter, unintended result, however, when the magazine's editor was tried on obscenity charges...
...South often feels to me like one small antimodernist town, with the same twisted vines and story lines running through it. The last person I spoke to in Mississippi, ex-Governor William Forrest Winter, told me about sitting on his granddaddy's knee as a boy and hearing stories about how the old man fought under the fearless Confederate hero Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose last name became Winter's middle name. This same hero, however, was accused of slaughtering black Union soldiers who surrendered in a battle at Fort Pillow, Tenn. He went on to become the first Imperial Wizard...
...read O PTI CIEN--which, read aloud, translates as either "o little dog" or "at the sign of the little dog." This is exactly the sort of feeble punning that Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia went in for--a staple of Dada and Surrealism. But its author was the antimodernist par excellence Jean-Leon Gerome, sworn enemy of Manet, Monet and everyone since. Which perhaps only shows that academics can be just as funny as Dadaists...
Both, too, were profoundly out of fashion for most of the 1970s and '80s, during the era of ferocious antimodernist reaction. But now the pendulum is swinging back again, which may account for this week's eleventh-hour attempt to rehabilitate two modernist reputations at once. Neither prizewinner is interested in making a pretense of mellowness. In the acceptance speech he prepared for his daughter to read, Niemeyer disparaged a "minor architecture made with a ruler and square" and, a bit self-servingly, endorsed the "search for the spectacular." The more plainspoken Bunshaft dismisses apostates and revels in his sense...
...artists in our century have won worldwide fame by creating works whose best-known image is the child as sex object. One was the writer Vladimir Nabokov; the other is the painter Balthus. He is the antimodernist's modernist. His retrospective at the Pompidou Center in Paris this past winter drew large crowds, and in a March auction in London, one of his paintings went for more than $1 million...