Word: avant
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...Benton's is a curious case because, despite all the hollering he and his admirers produced about down-home values and art for the common man, he was no kind of naif. He had studied in Paris before World War I and was closely tied to the expatriate avant-garde there, especially Stanton Macdonald-Wright, whose "synchromist" abstractions were among the most advanced experiments being done by any American painter. In New York in the early '20s, Benton dressed (as one of his friends would remark) like "the antithesis of everything American," and had a peripheral relationship to Alfred Stieglitz...
...cubofuturist planes -- are beginning to sell in the West, so he has hard currency but nowhere to paint. To get studio space in Moscow on an official basis, you must belong to the Artists Union and do "real" aesthetic work. Some of the best-known figures in the Soviet avant-garde, like Erik Bulatov and Oleg Vasilyev, who share working space, are still officially registered as illustrators of children's books...
...Nesterova, for instance, with her brooding groups of figures, locked in thick, silvery paint and dense with melancholy, or, in the area of abstraction, Erick Stenberg. In the 1960s and '70s, Stenberg's work was a prolonged meditation on constructivism and suprematism, the chief movements of the "classical" Russian avant-garde in the years just before and after the revolution: finely tuned planar constructions in a pale, deep space. Lately, in a way that parallels Malevich's return to peasant themes in the 1920s, Stenberg has deepened his color and turned to images of a remote village where he spends...
Mikhulskaya and Fillipova are emerging leaders in the avant-garde underworld of Soviet fashion design. They labor over sewing machines in cramped apartments shared by husbands and children; every drawer is crammed with fabric, zippers and buttons scrounged up in state stores and weekend flea markets. Thanks to their sardonic use of hallowed Soviet symbols, the two women cannot be members of the Society of Soviet Designers, and their styles are not bought by Dom Modeli, the state fashion center...
Adams had been in jail for eight years when Errol Morris, an avant-garde film-maker from New York City, came to Texas to make a documentary about Dr. James Grigson, known as Dr. Death to defense lawyers for his consistent findings that convicted murderers were so unrepentant that they deserved execution. In its zeal to help Morris, the Dallas district attorney's office turned over the dusty records from Adams' trial. What Morris found in the boxes was more intriguing than Dr. Death: evidence of a prosecution willing to bend, if not break, the guarantees of a fair trial...