Word: artists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Intense, erotic, opulently colorful, the flower paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe provide a heady mixture of sheer sensory shock and austere formalism, of extreme close-up scale and bold monumentality. In this 100th anniversary year of the artist's birth, a selection has been beautifully reproduced in Georgia O'Keeffe: One Hundred Flowers (Knopf; $100). Their richness and vibrancy seem to leave nothing to say, and Editor Nicholas Callaway, except in a brief afterword, presents the plates without comment. The effect is magnificently simple, and simply magnificent...
...Artists are known for what they push away as well as for what they embrace. So it was with Paul Gauguin, who for a century has fired the escapist imagination with his rejection of conventional life and academic painting for la vie Tahitienne and a bold new art. Paul Gauguin: Life and Work, by Michel Hoog (Rizzoli; 332 pages; $85), presents the Gauguin legend on a grand scale, from the artist's exotic Peruvian boyhood to his South Seas idyll. Hoog, chief curator at Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris, integrates the painter's biography with a broad representation...
...finished at 60, yet when he died at 80, in 1980, he was widely recognized as a genius. The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson, by Frank Rich with Lisa Aronson (Knopf; 323 pages; $75), shows why. The authors (respectively, the drama critic of the New York Times and the artist's widow) use photos and Aronson's vivid sketches and paintings to document the bulk of his more than 100 designs, including Broadway's The Crucible, The Diary of Anne Frank, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Company, Follies and Pacific Overtures. The authoritative text evokes the artist's crusty personality...
...from right-wing Senators and to blasts from the conservative press. The attacks are eerily reminiscent of the ones against him in the early '50s and '60s, and they have been painful to the proud old hawk. "It's no fun and damned unfair being depicted as a giveaway artist," he confided to a colleague recently...
...lumberyard with her mother in hopes of finding her father's name carved on one of the logs sent there from a labor camp; their search is in vain, but another woman does spot her husband's initials and caresses them tenderly. Another memorable sequence shows the defendant's artist father, dressed only in a white loincloth, hanging by his wrists like the crucified Christ. It is one of several explicit religious images that portray the struggle of good against evil in a way that unfailingly identifies the latter with officialdom and the former with its victims. Lest the viewer...