Word: avant
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...weak start -- some feeble pastiches of Impressionism, and then a brief phase of yearning Symbolist mystagogy. But then the impact of Fauvism kicked in around 1910, and there was no stopping him. With a kind of relentless metabolic energy, Malevich started grinding through the styles of the Parisian avant-garde, producing unmistakably Russian paintings as he did so. "I remained on the side of peasant art and began to paint in the primitive spirit," he wrote later. The bulky twisting serfs in Floor Polishers, 1911-12, are the laboring cousins of the ecstatic figures in Matisse's La Danse...
...then came the ice of Stalinism, the crushing of the cultural avant- garde. Malevich retracted; he went back to painting cutouts of peasants in the field; his last picture, from 1933, is a realist self-portrait in which the primary colors of Suprematism are shifted into the panels of the costume he wears. He looks like Christopher Columbus, as well he might...
Unlike Malevich, Liubov Popova died young -- scarlet fever got her in 1924, before Stalin's purges could. She was only 35. At least she was spared the miseries of censorship and persecution visited on other Russian avant-gardists by Stalin. Moreover, she died at a time when it was still possible for an idealistic, exuberantly gifted young artist like herself to believe in the promise of Leninism. Her last works, such as the 1923 collage stage design for a play about the revolution called Earth in Turmoil -- showing a helmeted aviator, prototype of the new Soviet Man, gazing...
WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN. In Europe, Robert Wilson is the most famous American stage director. In the U.S., the anti-verbal, visually lyrical elder statesman of the avant-garde is little known. He designed, mounted and adapted for Harvard's American Repertory Theater this spellbinding Ibsen dreamscape about an artist looking back and summing...
These questions, and others, are now raised and answered by an altogether fascinating reconstruction of "Entartete Kunst," which opened last week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant- Garde in Nazi Germany" is the result of five years of patient detective work led by art historian Stephanie Barron, whose specialty is the art and cultural politics of Germany in the '20s and '30s. With the help of photographs that had lain unconsulted since the end of World War II in the archives of the National Gallery in Berlin, Barron was able...