Word: avante
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Early this century, the Ballets Russes toured Europe and performed dances that helped lay the foundation for modern ballet; a young George Ballanchine honed his craft with this troupe. Under the direction of Russian impresario Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes featured the avant-garde: music by Stravinsky and Debussy, sets by Picasso and Matisse, choreography by Fokine and Nijinsky. The film opens in 1912, with Nijinsky (George de la Pena) at the height of his distinguished dancing career, and beginning to design his own ballets, encouraged by mentor and lover Diaghilev (Alan Bates). But as Nijinsky's innovative ballets meet with...
...Courbet alone, three to Degas, others to Millet and the Barbizon School. Besides a solid representation of the century's early neoclassicists and a number of Goyas, the new spaces allow a full sampling of the sentimental and pretentious salon art that the century's avant-garde had to contend againstCabanel's sleekly erotic nudes, Meissonier's bombastic battle scenes, Regnault's slyly erotic-exotic Salome, Rosa Bonheur's huge Horse Fair, Bastien-Lepage's sentimentalized Joan of Arc. Of the 22 Courbets, only 8 had been on view...
...with its gauze-veiled figure of Lady Luck bumping on her wheel down the steps of the Paris Bourse? In such respects, the show will do much to replace the "heroic" image of early modernism?the intransigents battling the Academy?with a cozier picture, in which pompier and avant-garde share the common ground of being figurative, of supplying comprehensible images to a public bored or intimidated by abstract...
Bartók: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 (Maurizio Pollini, Chicago Symphony, Claudio Abbado conductor, Deutsche Grammophon). Pollini has had a banner year on disc, issuing fine performances of a staple of the repertory (Beethoven's Third Concerto) as well as an avant-garde experiment (Luigi Nono's... sofferte onde serene ...). This set-modernist but accessible- falls happily in-between. Bartók's angular octaves and Hungarian folk rhythms tempt many pianists to turn into percussionists. Pollini achieves a biting authority without ever banging...
...more likely, though, that the arts appeared less experimental because in each case the mainstream adopted and popularized what had previously been the domain of the avant-garde, while the fringe groups, the repertory theaters, independent film studios and artists' colonies where experimentation traditionally takes place, failed to innovate upon the increasing scale of outlandishness to which we had become accustomed. Off-Broadway became almost as conventional as the Great White Way itself, and nearly as expensive, so much so that a new term and class of theater, "Off-Off-Broadway," emerged. Save for disco, popular music spawned nothing...