Word: avante
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...text, Haskell argues that the major revelation is the all but forgotten series of semi-abstractions that Hartley painted in Germany between 1913 and 1915. She maintains that "these paintings were equal in achievement and sophistication to any work being done by the key figures of the European avant-garde." But to the less zealous eye, the show proves almost the reverse. Even Haskell concedes that well before he left for Europe, Hartley had developed a style that was distinctively his own, deeply rooted in his native Maine. After Berlin it took him nearly 20 years of floundering among styles...
Mediocrity seems to be the villain of this piece, especially to young, Jewish, New York avant-garde poet Ira Streiker played by Ray Sharkey with all of the obnoxious energy of a real-life poet whose name almost rhymes with Strindberg. In three short sequences, Sharkey opens up with the abrasive, honest creativity that soured critics and the general public to Bohemian art. He sours some of his friends, too, but his attempt to fight mediocrity with boldness stands out in a film that turns the lives of three vibrant, struggling, unusual people into three mud puddles...
...work of his favorite painter, Alexander Gerasimov, whose portraits of the dictator in various noble poses hung in museums, offices, factories and homes everywhere. At the same time, in the '30s and '40s, Stalin used every kind of coercion to apply the Socialist Realism doctrine, destroying the avant-garde and the contacts with Western artists that it needed. By 1953, when Stalin died, no Soviet artist could see, except in the most fragmentary way, any modernist art at all; the work of the constructivists, that heritage of Russian intellect and radical enthusiasm, was invisible...
...juggling by 1939, but much larger and more influential than the poets and painters around the studios of the Bateau-Lavoir. It was a public of admiring consumers, the cultivated gratin of Europe, people who needed a modern Rubens. Moreover, there had been a general recoil from extreme avant-garde art, on principle, after 1918. What seemed necessary was reconstruction, not more iconoclasm, or, in the words of Jean Cocteau, a rappel à l'ordre (call to order), which would place art under the normalizing sway of classical nostalgia. "Revolutionary" art simply did not look good around the 16th Arrondissement...
DARYL HALL, the blond keyboardist of Hall and Oates, momentarily broke loose in the summer of 1977 from the laid-back, blue-eyed soul image he had built with the duo, and surreptitiously recorded an album under the production of Robert Fripp, a well-known avant-garde musician. RCA, Hall's record company, refused to release the album because it feared that the record would shatter Hall's commercially successful, syrupy facade. So, capitalism stifled creative expression until the long-awaited recent release of the in-famous Hall-Fripp collaboration, Sacred Songs...