Word: avante
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Italian avant-garde before World War I, where this show begins, found itself in a fix under the immense shadow of its own cultural history. Either it made a diverting Oedipal commotion about the loathsome oppressiveness of the past, like the futurists, or immersed itself in poignant reveries about its authoritarian and alienating beauty, like Giorgio de Chirico and his associates in metaphysical painting...
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...
...fault is not entirely Janowitz's. Her only hope was to find a director who could either respond avidly to the sexual and creative energies of the avant-garde scene or take a satirical cudgel to it. Instead, she drew distant, enervated James Ivory (A Room with a View, Heat and Dust, The Bostonians), who never seems to engage fully with any subject he has tackled and who has never been more fastidiously withdrawn than he is here. In this case, however, audiences will be well advised to follow his example...