Word: artists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Americans get the opportunity to have their eyes opened by such a hike. The painter's vision can nonetheless be shared, reasons a New York artist named Alan Gussow. Backed by a leading environmental group, Friends of the Earth, he has just produced a handsome coffee-table book entitled A Sense of Place: The Artist and the American Land (Saturday Review Press; $27.50). It juxtaposes 67 American landscapes, painted from the 16th century to the present, with a description of what moved each artist to select the scene. The result is astonishingly successful; no careful reader should...
Gussow defines an artist's chosen landscape as "a piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by feelings." It has always been thus, even when the U.S. was a complete wilderness and artists were merely its sensitive surveyors. In 1585, for example, John White was sent to the New World to "bring back descriptions of beasts, birds, fishes, trees, townes, etc." His watercolor of Indians fishing in Virginia gives not only the basic facts but the artist's response as well-enchantment...
...time, the Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher seemed a cultural anomaly. He loathed modern art-"I consider 60% of the artists nuts and fakes," he said of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum-and was duly ignored by it. For most of his working life, critics dismissed him as a pedantic illustrator. Born in 1898, Escher was 52 before his tightly executed woodcuts, lithographs and engravings began to attract even a crumb of attention. A retiring, ironic man with the bony nose and goat beard of an El Greco prelate, Escher took no part in art debates, lived quietly...
...question is: Why? Considered as a formal artist, Escher was virtually negligible. His use of color was dull and his drawing had a serviceably vulgar look: the way Escher described the human figure, for instance, made Norman Rockwell look like Giorgione. Much of his architectural imagery is supermarket Piranesi...
...YEAR when Charlie Chaplin has finally been readmitted to the country, it is equally refreshing to see another great artist revived from a politically-imposed obscurity. Weill's music is durable, his lyricists talented, his message irrepressible. Perhaps some of his ideas rub off or the suburban crowd. You never can tell...