Word: avant
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Along with Cocteau, the avant-garde French writer and film director whose aphorism he quotes frequently these days, Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent may be fou like a fox. After years of beguiling women into austerely tailored pantsuits, now, in this cool age of less is more and casual is all, the world's most influential couturier has stopped the parade with a collection of high-camp peasant fashions that are impractical, fantastical and egotistical. They are also subtle, sumptuous, sensual and jubilantly feminine. The overwhelming first American response, both from those who deal in clothes and those...
...great moment in the making of modern art. But there is a great crisis in our ideas about it, and that crisis is the content of the 1976 Venice Biennale, which opened to the public last week. We know the pieties-that the avant-garde is embattled, that culture transcends politics, that abstract art speaks a language uncontaminated by ideology, that modernism somehow makes us free. Throughout the '50s and early '60s, the Biennale-that sprawl of art exhibitions devoted to the newest of the new, held every two years in a cluster of national pavilions beside...
...fascinating assembly called "Rationalism and Architecture in Italy During the Fascist Regime," irrefutably demonstrates how it could and did. Likewise, we suppose that the "advanced" movements in Spanish art during the past 40 years must have threatened Franco's commissars. But a historical show entitled "Spain, Artistic Avant-Garde and Social Reality 1936-76," suggests that it was otherwise, that after the moment of heroic protest symbolized by Picasso's Guernica, the regime itself started to exploit, for its own benefit, the success of the Spanish avantgarde...
...American cultural imperialism that has been such a topic of recent discussion in the art world: the work evaporated completely, nothing to look at, only the support system - a white wall, a catalogue, an official role and the usual supporting grants - the last move in the institutional avant-garde game...
Such success has inured window designers and their bosses to the inevitable complaints. Mary Avant, designer for Foley's department store in Houston, put together a weird display called "Black Magic": two male mannequins in black jockey shorts, four females in black evening wear. All the figures were spray-painted black and had limbs suspended apart from the torsos. "A little old lady came in and screamed, 'Oh, God, how horrifying!' " relates Avant. The store manager shrugged off the protest: two days later Foley's had no more of the garments to sell...