Word: artes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...behind the tick of the big clocks in Paris and Berlin whether you were Childe Hassam doing Impressionist streetscapes 30 years after Monet or a New York abstractionist producing ideal geometries in the early 1940s. "We all steal," said Arshile Gorky to Ilya Bolotowsky. "You steal from Cahiers d'Art [a French art magazine of the '30s]; I steal from Cahiers d'Art. The only difference is I steal better than you, because I know French and you don't!" The very American twist on this story was that Gorky didn't actually know any more French than Bolotowsky...
...from Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Picabia, Leger, etc., etc. Nothing characteristically American there, you might say. But the crux of the identity issue is not the stylistic sources the artists drew on but the experiences on which they used them. It was there that the American-ness of American art hove into view, and it showed itself in two enormous image fields...
...first of these was the idea of landscape as epic, spiritual and transcendental. The cluster of feelings surrounding American landscape had come directly into modern art from 19th century images of sacred wilderness--God's fingerprint, there in the Catskills or the Grand Canyon. This would be faithfully preserved by photographers, like Ansel Adams at Yosemite. But 20th century painters from Dove and Hartley through Pollock conveyed them into more modern idioms, often with great power and poignancy. Landscape, in fact, was the matrix in which most of the impulses of American abstract art, except for its weaker strand...
Ouch. When even plays start to talk about whether plays are irrelevant, you know this is an art form in trouble. Yet the irony is that these lines are spoken in a play that is drawing near sellout crowds on Broadway and at the end of a season in which serious dramas have made a remarkable comeback. The new shows this season with the toughest tickets aren't the big splashy musicals (most of them were big splashy busts) but straight plays--especially revivals of two old-fashioned, slow-moving classics, Death of a Salesman and The Iceman Cometh...
...several contrapuntal themes: the rise of Dominic (Tate Donovan) from striving young critic to media superstar; Esme's descent into financial ruin; her mother-in-law's slide into senility. All of which is arrayed on a Shavian battlefield in which strong and articulate people grapple with ideas about art and life...