Word: artistes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...toughness--ran a sailors' bar on the waterfront. He studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts in the 1920s. It often used to be said that de Kooning got an extensive training in classical draftsmanship there. This wasn't true. What he wanted to be was a commercial artist, an illustrator--to do the kinds of illustrations he had seen in American magazines...
This early background helps explain the irrepressible fondness for popular culture--cigarette ads, Marilyns and so forth--that kept surfacing in his work in the 1950s, to the annoyance of some American critics. De Kooning was never a "pure" artist, partly because he was not trained to be one. But that was what enabled him to connect with America in a way few avant-garde painters had. He loved the lushness, the grittiness, the obtrusive weirdness of American cultural vernaculars. Though by the end of the '50s, laden with celebrity, he had become the man for younger artists to beat...
...Kooning, however, was inherently a corporeal artist. His best work had a wonderful libidinousness, a way of using the body of paint to access and encompass the body of the world. To call it abstract, even when it was most so, is to ignore this. In what was probably his finest painting, Excavation, 1950, one sees desire at full stretch: every form carries its physical freight--elbow, groin, folded belly, thigh, slipping and jostling in the paint as though mud wrestling in pigment. De Kooning could find metaphors of energy that none of his contemporaries could rival. And when...
...shots of people talking about their troubles, working them through on the basis of faulty information and silly suppositions. Case in point: Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck). He draws underground comic books with his boyhood pal Banky (Jason Lee). Then he meets Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams), also a comix artist, and falls into obsession. The problem is, she?s a lesbian. Well, nobody?s perfect. And, indeed, she?s not perfectly gay, for eventually she succumbs to Holden?s passion. This makes him feel terrific?the superstud who has conquered the unconquerable. Except that Banky?who has some homoerotic issues...
...shots of people talking about their troubles, working them through on the basis of faulty information and silly suppositions. Case in point: Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck). He draws underground comic books with his boyhood pal Banky (Jason Lee). Then he meets Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams), also a comix artist, and falls into obsession. The problem is, she?s a lesbian. Well, nobody?s perfect. And, indeed, she?s not perfectly gay, for eventually she succumbs to Holden?s passion. This makes him feel terrific?the superstud who has conquered the unconquerable. Except that Banky?who has some homoerotic issues...