Word: avant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...MOMA of Neutra's famous Lovell House, built between 1927 and 1929 in the arid Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, still quicken the viewer's heartbeat. There had been nothing like it before, nor was there to be anything like it during that decade, not even in avant-garde Europe, where Mies van der Robe's pristinely trend-setting steel-and-glass Tugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia, was completed a year later...
...artistic director, Glen Eytchison, 27, is an intense veteran of Southern California repertory theater, whose appointment four years ago stirred premonitions that he would emphasize avant-garde art, even (Pollock forbid!) abstract expressionists. Not to worry. "You have to understand the people of Laguna," Eytchison allows. "I am concerned with retaining their tradition. Of course, the show has to be bigger and better every year, but you can only stretch so far." This year's edition stretches to 24 tableaux, each of which is shown for about 90 seconds. They range from classics like Degas' Dancers Practicing...
...taken the rich vocabulary of dance, from the spine-straight balletic pas de deux to the earthbound dynamics of Martha Graham, and shaped it into a shifting and special language. He is the J.R.R. Tolkien of his form, and like the fabulist creates works too elaborate to please the avant-garde and too impudent for purists. In short, Taylor remains one of the most accessible of choreographers...
...hotel whose proprietor clears the entire premises when the two women move in. Their new line for fall features short skirts, knitted sweater dresses with hefty shoulders tapering down to a mid-thigh hemline, and Irish tweed overcoats that look like a Black and Tan fantasy. "We still do avant-garde clothes," Pinky says, "avantgarde and expensive, but we use lots of discipline in the men's things." Examples: silk shirts with small collars, suede as lively as dyed denim and a baseball jacket made of tweed and leather that no pitcher would risk leaving in the bullpen...
...hallmark of literary modernism is the notion that readers must earn their places at the feet of the masters. Serious art requires extended initiations; Finnegans Wake is not for the fainthearted, nor will Proust reward the impatient. Isaac Bashevis Singer, 77, began writing at about the time that this avant-garde assumption was hardening into orthodoxy, and somehow he never got the message. He went on with his work under the illusion that authors were still required to prove themselves to their audiences, and not the reverse. He told stories as if daring any of his listeners...