Word: appellative
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...Lewis Hine's 1932 Men At Work photographs, the worker is celebrated as "premier dancer and creator--choreographing, conducting, constructing, bringing the city to life--the Michelangelo of Manhattan." Ever conscious of his pedagogical responsibility to forge connections between these artists, Appel hammers home an academic comparison of Hine and Mondrian. Artist parallels worker, as a nexis, forging form from chaos...
...Appel leads the way through this bound gallery, he delivers the heart and soul of any Lit. and Arts B course. Themes! Yes, themes abound, wonderfully packaged and ready for short-answer essays. Vitality and Birth are set off in verbal neon and illustrated with Lachaise's rather indelicate nudes. Like Nighttown in Joyce's Ulysses, the modernist future is promising. Molly Bloom is celebrated in all her fecund glory...
...crops up repeatedly in The Art of Celebration. Gerald Murphy's "Razor" (1924), for instance, is a "signal work in the evolution of a self-conscious American vernacular art," a celebration of "small technological advances and the utilitarian elegance of industrial design." After High Modernism has run its course, Appel points to the resurrection of the vernacular in the wake...
...Appel also applauds the modernist glorification of construction, the city and technological innovation. Fernand Leger's "The City" (1919) is his point of departure, its "grandly optimistic if not utopian" vista ushering in a hopeful era of activity and communication. Likewise, Stuart Davis's painting "Swing Landscape" (1938), with its jazz dance composition, suggests a sense of connection, counter to T.S. Eliot's charge of "nothing connects" in "The Waste Land...
...Appel's critical stance on modernism is that of a fan, a supporter verging on groupie status. He urges that we "properly appreciate an enriching body of work that can be called `celebratory modernism,' and that we do so before the works in question have grown even dimmer or have disappeared entirely behind the newest academic fog banks." And his point is well taken. After all, Bauhaus vests trust in our aesthetic judgement and hopes for the future. It is a positive statement of mankind's ability to engineer his environment and there's something to be said for that...