Word: avant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...early January. "The difference was that Stalin's was conducted by a totalitarian state and used to promote a single product - communist ideology." The show's 200 paintings, posters and films trace the development of Soviet "agit-art," from its inception in 1918 among the painters of the Russian avant-garde to the heyday of Socialist Realism in the 1930s and 1940s. One reason it became so effective was that, especially in the early years, it was artist-driven. There was oversight and censorship by apparatchiks, of course, but it was the artists - impassioned by the Bolshevik Revolution, holding high...
...Christian Europe, Chagall was a natural-born alien. So it's no surprise that he was never comfortable within the confines of any of the European "isms." He arrived in Paris for the first time in 1910, when the avant-garde was still working under the spell of Cubism. Chagall took from it only what he could use, mostly the possibilities that Cubist fracturing offered as a way to lightly structure the space in which his figures moved. As for the more dedicated Cubists around him in the Paris art world, he wrote, "Let them eat their fill of their...
...returned to Russia for what he thought would be a brief visit, only to be trapped there for eight years by war and revolution. Named by the Soviets as arts commissar for Vitebsk, he headed for a time the People's School of Art, where the faculty included the avant-gardists Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky. Chagall's vision of a school that would encourage every tendency ran afoul of Malevich's exclusive faith in abstraction. In time Malevich and his followers seized the place in the name of Suprematism and its militant modernism...
DIED. DOUG MICHELS, 59, avant-garde artist and architect who co-founded the San Francisco-based "underground architecture" studio Ant Farm; in a fall while climbing alone to a whale observation point; near Sydney, Australia. In 1974, he installed the famed "Cadillac Ranch" in Amarillo, Texas. The outdoor sculpture's 10 Cadillacs, thrust nose-down in the ground, were taken to represent the decline of U.S. industry...
...aren't as much about jazz as they are about quality music," says Fritz Thom, whose Vienna Jazz Festival (June 23-July 13) first took root when pianist Keith Jarrett played the Staatsoper in 1991. "We're an urban festival, and we need a broad spectrum, from mainstream to avant garde," says Thom, whose offerings this year include pianist Chick Corea and New Orleans legend Dr. John...