Word: avant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This Hobson's choice has risks in both directions--a traditional show may be too boring, and an avant-garde treatment may be too freaky for popular acceptance. Either way, it's hard to win. An example is the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of Hamlet in 1975. The show featured a fine cast, including Sam Waterston as the prince and Ruby Dee as Gertrude, but their fine performances were underwhelmed by aggressively groovy staging, which featured banks of lights flashing into the audience whenever a climactic moment came to pass...
...silent paintings, populated by cats and malignant-looking, narcissistic girls, offer their distant homages to surrealism. Balthus' work is, to put it mildly, post-Freudian. But the innovations of the past 40 years' art-the movements, polemics and epileptic spasms that form the twilight of the avant-garde-have not touched it at all. Against all odds, Balthus paints as though the tradition that runs from Donatello to Courbet had never broken. For that reason alone, any Balthus show compels interest; and the group of 24 paintings and drawings, ranging from 1934 to 1977, that went on view...
Someone once said that avant-garde movements inevitable lose their momentum, citing Impressionism and the hippie movement as classic examples of his theory. Yet the art of Malet is fortunate: Created in an age so befuddled by every kind of "-ism" from Fauvism to Cubism to Dadaism, and with new fashions developing in geometric progression, it is graced by a label which, while evoking instant recognition (everyone's aunt gushes over "the lovely Impressionist paintings"), does not really set any limits on an artist's self-expression. Impressions pure and simple. Few painters escape the biggest pitfall along this path...
...imaginable sort of artifact, from a suprematist teacup by the pioneer Russian abstractionist Kasimir Malevich to a Bauhaus gramophone. The exhibition catalogue is as thick as a brick; one needs persistence, but is richly rewarded. For "Trends of the Twenties" offers a vast and unique panorama of the European avant-garde in its most exacerbated sense of crisis, despair and hope-the years between Sarajevo and the Wall Street crash, the time of the Great War, the Russian Revolution and the Weimar Republic. This was the last period in which the dream of the engaged avant-garde seemed credible: that...
...essential desire of constructivism -from De Stijl to the Bauhaus in Germany, and particularly with the Russian avant-garde in its flowering through the early years of the revolution-was to construct a beauty that could not be found in nature. Only one metaphor was allowed to intrude into the garden of absolute form: that of the machine. The dynamics of manufacture supplied, for Russian constructivism, the prototype of revolution This permitted Tallin, Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and others to create, during the first years after the Soviet Revolution, the only radical art of the 20th century that meshed with radical...