Word: avant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...guilty of flouting convention, so is Rei Kawakubo. Since 1981, when she made her first Paris showing, the creative force behind Comme des Garons has taken avant-garde fashion to evermore jaw-dropping levels. Jagged ruffles, tattered plaid and wads of foam creating Quasimodo-like lumps are all incorporated into a body of work that can hardly be described as ready-to-wear. Jorge Silvetti, Chair of the GSD Department of Architecture, quoted Kawakubo as having said "I want to design clothes that have not yet existed; I want to be rebellious." Despite, or perhaps because of, her defiantly individualistic...
Malevich, Popova, Kandinsky, Chagall-these are the names that typically come to mind when someone mentions the Russian avant-garde in its early twentieth century heyday. In her book Exploring Color: Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-Garde, 1910-1918, art historian Nina Gurianova adds a new name to the old list by paying tribute to Olga Rozanova, a lesser known artist, and showing how she helped pioneer developments in futurism, suprematism and the role of color in painting...
Olga Rozanova (1886-1918) left behind a legacy of art, poetry and theoretical articles that provides a key to understanding the cultural ferment of the early avant-garde movement in Russia. Her collaboration with the poet Aleksei Kruchenykh sought to overcome the boundaries that separate poetry from art. The two worked together on various projects, mostly editions of lithographic futurist books, enthused by the idea that words should serve as visual symbols that lack any specific meaning...
...Gurianova's book is the first full-length study of Rozanova. Her accumulation of a vast number of primary sources-letters, articles, manifestos-is, along with a detailed chronology of Rozanova's life, the crowning achievement of the work. Gurianova's remarks about the evolution of avant-garde styles from long-standing traditions in art and literature are insightful. In her chapter on "The Futurist Shift," Gurianova draws a connection between Rozanova's lithographs made to embellish Kruchenykh's narrative poem Game in Hell and the "denizens of the underworld" of Gogol and Pushkin. Noting how Rozanova...
...Despite these flaws, Gurianova succeeds in providing a glimpse into the life of an artist who continually sought new forms and new means of expression in her work. She makes the important point that Rozanova's career "reflects in miniature the fate of the early Russian avant-garde, which was driven by an inexorable and constant striving for renewal and a denial of previous achievements...