Word: arcadian
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Where did the Arcadian side of Pop go? Down the memory hole, into the unrecoverable past, along with the America it represented. The crass, brash commercial imagery that the Pop artists seized on is still there, looming even larger than it did 30 years ago, but it no longer offers art the same possibilities. The optimism of '60s Pop makes it look more romantic than it used to. Having been propaganda for its own culture, some of it has turned into history painting of a quite poignant sort. Robert Rauschenberg's Retroactive II, 1964, with its spaceman and its young...
...Metropolis" does not pretend to cover every kind of image made by artists and craftsmen in the '20s. Its focus is the city, and that alone -- so that although it includes Fernand Leger's The Mechanic, 1920, the arcadian strains in '20s French painting, Matisse and Derain, for example, find no place in it. And quite a lot of lesser art does because -- derivative or coarse though it sometimes is -- it has something to say about the pervasiveness of imagery. Much of Weimar-period German art is a crude mix of De Chirico and cartooning, but one doesn't object...
...this diffuse movement has been dismissed with the name given it by Jean Cocteau: le rappel a l'ordre, the call to order. The custom has been to see it as a hiatus in the forward drive of modernism -- at best a faltering of energy, and at worst an Arcadian sham, a rehearsal for the coarse, repressive state art of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. This show is the first to take an inquisitive and fair-minded look at it. The curators, Elizabeth Cowling of Edinburgh University and Jennifer Mundy of the Tate, have done an admirably lucid job of presenting...
...Massimo Campigli's painting, for instance, or Marino Marini's sculpture -- the % emphasis shifted from Roman marbles and Greek urns to the rougher, more vital- looking frescoes and terra-cottas of the Etruscans. The idea was to recapture a sense of antiquity that connoted a spirit of place, an Arcadian flavor, more Hesiodic than Augustan...
...Phillips, was the first American to buy De Stael in depth, and one has only to move to the other floors of this beloved institution to see the context from which De Stael sprang: the Matisses, the Bonnards, the late Braques, the august but now almost extinct line of arcadian modernism...