Word: artists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this fair to Warhol? No, if you are among those who think he was the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock, a genius whose spirit continues to brood over American culture and to infuse the best young art of our time. Yes, if you think that Warhol had about five remarkable years (1962-67) followed by a long downhill slide into money-raking banality, with his social portraits and his silk-screen editions of dogs, famous Jews of the 20th century and Mercedes; or that his actual influence on younger artists varied from liberating to moderately disastrous. The show...
...construction of a persona vivid in its coy blandness, pervasive and teasing in its appeal to the media, and deathlessly inorganic. Warhol looked like the last dandy, right from the start of his public career. As the late critic Harold Rosenberg put it, he was "the figure of the artist as nobody, though a nobody with a resounding signature." This subverted the romantic stereotype of the artist -- hot, involved, grappling with fate and transcendence -- that American popular culture, and hence most American collectors, had boiled down from Van Gogh and Pollock...
With some artists, death is only a ratification of decay: it releases them from the humiliations of their late careers. So it was with Salvador Dali, who when he died last week at 84 was perhaps the archetype of that 20th century phenomenon, the Embarrassing Genius. He was the first modern artist to exploit fully the mechanism of publicity. He appropriated the idea of the artist as demonic obsessive. He dealt with the question Why should your fantasies matter? by insisting that he was such an extraterrestrial creature, so tuned to the zeitgeist through the trembling antennas of his waxed...
Testa's loss of the commission for the apse of San Martin ai Monti because of his slow progress, was perhaps the final blow to the artist's emotions. And though one of his most important and demonstrative works, The Suicide of Cato, followed the withdrawal of this commission, some critics have interpreted this ingenious etching as a dramatic portrayal of anticipated reactions to his subsequent suicide. Perhaps this work was a kind of catharsis for the primarily unhappy and unfulfilled life of this tragic genius...
...impressive feature of the Sackler exhibit is its academic appeal. It is only being exhibited in two locations, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it was previously, and the Harvard Museums. And, while it is an impressive collection of the artist's works, its focus is not commercial attraction. In a time when etching seems to be enjoying a revival in the Boston area, with other etching exhibits at the Museum of Fine Arts and the satellite exhibit at the Fogg, the Sackler Testa production is noteworthy for the artist's superior technical achievements and for his incorporation...