Word: avant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Harvard's intelligentsia. Certainly the first and last pieces on the program by Samuel Barber and Manuel DeFalla could not possibly be considered "difficult" works and, to those familiar with Schoenberg's atonal period and the orchestral songs of Mahler, the Octandre by Edgar Varese, the French avant-garde composer and the Four Orchestra Songs by a young American, Benjamin Cutler, should not have posed insuperable problems of listening. More importantly, perhaps, they all provided ample opportunity for the orchestra to demonstrate its improved technical virtuosity and musical sensitivity...
...This creed spurred the art-for-art's-sake movement with which an entire generation of painters and writers thwacked at the Victorian taste for the didactic, the sentimental and the morally elevating. From London (where he moved in 1859), Whistler deployed his canvases like troops in this avant-garde campaign. The fury to which he goaded proper Victorians bubbled over in 1877 when Ruskin, the reigning art pundit of the day, wrote that Whistler was "a coxcomb, flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." At a farcical libel trial in which one of Whistler...
...made his first big money with fashion drawings for the Paris Vogue. Now settled in Manhattan, he spends a third of each year in Europe, charges $3,000 to $8,000 a portrait. He once dabbled in abstract expressionism, now pooh-poohs it: "I consider myself the avant garde, because nobody sings the song of the upper level of society today. Nobody speaks of the exceptional human being...
...works they show demonstrate. The best of the group is a reserved color lithograph by Andrew Stasik where a large mottled rectangular form slanted across the page elegantly balances the white of the paper surrounding it. As for the remaining few abstract pieces, they seem to be imitating avant-garde paintings while suffering from their inability to employ the tactile effects of pigment...
...triads: it consisted of 600 moppets between five and twelve. Children, so the theory goes, are the ideal connoisseurs of modern music, because they have no built-in esthetic prejudices, and last week Venice's prestigious International Festival of Contemporary Music paused in the midst of its strenuously avant-garde schedule to put the theory to the test. In the baroque Fenice Theater, the kids saw nine one-act Games and Fables for Children, composed on commission by a group of noted moderns...