Word: artful
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...outsiders had to describe Hong Kong's film scene, they might use words like prolific, thinking of the seemingly endless kung-fu films that the city's studios have churned out. Or, if they knew their art-house fare, they could call it sophisticated, with a nod to the international acclaim that such exquisitely shot films as Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000) have won in recent years. But, in fact, what was once one of the world's busiest film industries has been in financial and creative decline for some time. With just 50 homegrown...
...Twombly is the man who went backward. In 1957, when New York City had plainly overtaken Paris as the art world's center of gravity, Twombly, who was not yet 30, left Manhattan to settle for good in Italy. Even before that his art had been looking back in time to a lost classical world. His lifelong problem would be how to summon the past in a language that was absolutely of the here and now. He would solve that problem in some spectacular ways...
...London's Tate Modern through Sept. 14, it's not the kind limned in gentle twilight. The best pictures and sculptures in this confounding, mostly captivating show - which moves later to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and from there to Rome - are as tough-minded as any art of the last half-century...
...draw with his left hand, which his travels in North Africa had taught him to think of as the one reserved for wiping your rear. That made it the perfect hand to bring painting back to another kind of fundamental place. The classical world that Twombly invokes in his art isn't the white marble realm of Apollo. It's the sweaty Dionysian scrimmage. Any of his early canvases ? can be a landing field of airborne phalluses, breasts and buttocks, of things squirting, and of brown excremental splats. In The Italians, a 1961 painting begun after he moved...
...went to Los Angeles, studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse - and he learned as much from their robust pace as he did from the gritty humanism of Italian neo-realist films and the romantic sweep of Indian cinema in its postwar Golden Age. He was both an art-house auteur and a director of popular hits, at least in the Arab crescent. He made political points, often different ones in different movies, but his didacticism was typically overwhelmed by his irrepressible urge to entertain...