Word: avante
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like many sweet old buffers, he admired authority. He painted the artists lining up for the Salon des Independants as an army of black-clad troops, carrying paintings of identical size; it was a parody of the military metaphor of the avant-garde. Rousseau wanted honors, like his heroes. When the French government sent him a decoration by mistake he would not send it back, and obstinately wore its violet rosette for the rest of his life. It was the Palmes Academiques--a serendipitous fluke, in view of his obsession with exotic scenes of distant jungles...
...common people with dirty feet and ragged sleeves. There is also a homosexual Caravaggio, moved into the spotlight during the '70s by gay liberation: the painter of overripe, peachy bits of rough trade, with yearning mouths and hair like black ice cream. Most of all, there is Caravaggio the avant-gardist...
Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius, which identifies Caravaggio as the first avant-garde artist. Our time, with its craving for rapid and unnerving change in the look of art, was bound to love Caravaggio. He was called an evil genius, an anti-Michelangelo; his work was compared to an overpeppered stew, and it became a favorite pretext for centrist finger wagging in the 17th century...
...Avant garde play "the CIVIL warS"--plagued by walkouts when it previewed at the American Repertory Theatre (ART) two weeks ago--has been extended through March 23 for an extra six shows...
...Eight Lines the creative exchange is reversed: a classical choreographer goes to the avant-garde for a musical inspiration. Robbins has done this with great success once before, in his 1983 hit, Glass Pieces. That ballet was a boldly theatrical vision of city life--densely populated, aggressive, peremptory, endlessly churning. Because their music is superficially quite similar, the two works are bound to be compared. Eight Lines is slighter and more evanescent but it is also more intimate and charming, and it is ravishing to look...