Word: artiste
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fassbinder, whose first big-budget film and first film in English this is, gives an appropriate quality of ponderous slap stick to the first half of the movie. There is a lot of blubbery smooching between Hermann's wife and her lascivious cousin, a bulky red-bearded artist (Volker Spengler). Hermann ignores this, but giggles apprehensively about the infant Nazi Party: "The National Socialists are against the Socialists and also against the Nationalists." In an odd scene witnessed by the distracted chocolate manufacturer, Brownshirts throw bricks at the shopwindow of a Jewish butcher, but the bricks do not seem...
Dylan's reputation, in historical perspective if not current application, is immense, possibly unrivaled. Young is a more insular artist whose stormy tenure with Crosby, Stills and Nash brought him his first fast shot of celebrity. Twelve subsequent solo albums have sold erratically but, all together, form a body of work hard to beat for reckless honesty and his own kind of compound romanticism, which can veer sharply from sentimental to sulfuric at the bend of a lyric. Dylan both mocked and gloried in his informal ordination as a generation's prophet. Young, fully as ambitious...
Accident, madness and suicide have only one effect on an artist's career: they stop it. But they can do wonders for reputation. We might feel different about Van Gogh if, instead of shooting himself in the gut at 37, he had died full of age and honors in bed. The demand for Jackson Pollock's least scribble might be less fierce if a skidding car had not sent him the way of James Dean. And what of Mark Rothko, who killed himself with a razor and pills in 1970? In hindsight, death appeared to be the central image...
...inherit is nothing; what counts is what an artist does with his legacy. The problems raised by Rothko's august aims were taxing. He lived in the wrong time and place. His ambition was rabbinical. He wanted to be a major religious artist, not a dealer's monk: to produce overwhelming images of transcendence and numinosity?the light of heaven, as it were, without the attendant saints and angels. But the images had no cultural environment to reinforce them. Rothko always protested against a narrowly aesthetic response to his work, but tie was addressing an audience of aesthetes, not true...
...service of incommunicable feelings, and the sad facts of Rothko's life rush in to complete the missing subject matter. In a sense, the late works are declarations of the impotence of painting: it could not blot up enough anguish, or take the burden of existence away from the artist. The Black Hole expanded to fill the canvas, but no surface could contain the hole. ?Robert Hughes