Word: avante
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...concise and mighty industrial-based forms of American building, conceived by architects from James Bogardus in the 1850s to Louis Sullivan in the 1890s and by the engineers of a technology whose emblematic climax was John and Washington Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge, were among the prototypes of European avant-garde thinking before and after World War I. Even to the Russian constructivists, "Americanism" was something infinitely desirable: it stood for electricity, progress, a society knit together and made transparent by fast communication...
...Orsay's program must begin after the peak of the romantic movement. Cachin, Laclotte and the new museum's staff wanted to start in 1863 -- the emblematic year that saw the first Salon des Refuses, Manet's epochal Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe and the formal rupture of the avant-garde from the academy. Giscard demurred. He wanted Orsay to begin in 1830, with Delacroix's Liberty Guiding the People -- which the Louvre flatly refused to release. Back to the drawing board. But then, in 1981 a new Socialist government headed by Francois Mitterrand came in, and Mitterrand...
...ought, in the eyes of a retrospective modernism, to have been. Orsay, one feels, was right to include the work of these heroic flatterers and contaminated virtuosos. Not only are they better than we once thought, but they help one recognize the true achievement of the avant-garde alternative. The triumph of the avant- garde over the pompiers has been so complete that one can now look at the losers with calm interest and historical understanding. This is not a matter of camp revival, as some moralists insist, but of real history as against pious polemic...
...painters and dumb museums; today the reverse. It is inconceivable that the marginality and hamfistedness of most of what passes for major painting at the end of the 20th century could have been taken seriously in the Paris of Degas, Cezanne and Rodin. Under the heat of the market, avant-garde and pompier have simply fused into an opaque, complacent lump. Only in the museum, it seems, can the full evidence of creativity be reconstituted. If we are to enter the world of our great-grandparents and discover why their values in art, for better and worse, were so much...
...notion of a country-rock and torch-ballad singer fronting an electronic avant-garde ensemble may seem fairly far out, but it appeared to be a normal idea to Composer Philip Glass. Last week the minimalist music master completed a five-show, three-city tour showcasing Songs from Liquid Days, a song cycle performed by the likes of Linda Ronstadt and The Roches to lyrics by Paul Simon, David Byrne and Laurie Anderson. Anyone hoping for a Top Ten single from the extravaganza is likely to be disappointed. The songs are more symphonic than pop, Glass explains. "There's really...