Word: art
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wanted to make a direct statement without words," recalls Duchamp's widow. "Something you look at and just feel." The museum permits no photographs; the implications and the richness of innuendo must rest solely in the mind. What has one really seen? Is this a celebration of sex? Art? Life? Is eros, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder? And what of that strange sense of flesh, poignant and vulnerable as a falling leaf, poised against the spectacle of nature...
...several years," observed New York's Current Literature magazine in 1908, "the art world of Paris has shown interest in the work of Henry O. Tanner, an American painter who has done much toward strengthening that high position won for us by Sargent and Whistler. In America, recognition of Tanner's genius has been retarded by the fact that he is a Negro...
Tanner enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied between 1880 and 1882 under Thomas Eakins, who helped turn him from landscapes to genre scenes. The Banjo Lesson, done in about 1893, is typical in its unsentimental, robust honesty. Tanner's first one-man show, in Cincinnati, failed to sell a single picture to the public. He sailed in 1891 for Paris, where he must have seemed rather prim to the rowdy French art students who studied with him at the Academie Julien. Thanks to his Methodist upbringing, Tanner refused to touch wine at first...
...Tanner was a conservative. Nonetheless, he enjoyed a remarkable popular success. Soon after he arrived in Paris, he began to paint Biblical subjects in Oriental settings. Executed with sinuous vigor of line and a dramatic use of chiaroscuro, these pictures had much in common stylistically with Edouard Vuillard and Art Nouveau. When Daniel in the Lion's Den was shown in the Paris Salon in 1896, the famous French history painter Jean-Leon Gerome insisted that it be given a place of honor. When the Raising of Lazarus was shown in 1897, it was awarded a medal and purchased...
Between the extreme partisans?those who hail the phenomenon as liberation and those who condemn it as decadence?there is room for some serious con cern about what it means in American life. In a sense, the creative arts and even their sleazy offshoots?blue movies, smut books, peepshows, prurient tabloids ?hold a public mirror to a society's private fantasies. A nation gets the kind of art and entertainment it wants and will pay for. Thus to many serious critics, and they are by no means all bluenoses or comstockians, the explosion of salacity in cinema, theater...