Word: berlins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nearly every day for four decades, the prisoner took a stroll through a tiny garden inside West Berlin's forbidding Spandau fortress. He was never without a keeper and his gait had slowed to a shuffle over the years, but he rarely missed the opportunity for fresh air. Last Monday a guard left him alone briefly in a small cottage at the garden's edge. A few minutes later the guard returned to find the sole inmate of Spandau slumped over, an electrical cord wound tightly around his neck. Rushed to the nearby British Military Hospital...
Only the Soviets had thought Hess was worth guarding like a latter-day Count of Monte Cristo. British, French and U.S. authorities had long been willing to release him on humanitarian grounds. Keeping the 109-year-old prison open for one inmate was also extremely costly: West Berlin and the Bonn government spent some $1 million annually in salaries and expenses to maintain a staff of 35 wardens, cooks and maintenance men. But the Soviets were adamant, insisting that, as their late leader Leonid Brezhnev put it, "to release Rudolf Hess would be an insult to the Soviet people...
...protagonist cannot fit on the walls. Berlin itself is the great metaphor, indeed the cause, of the lack of assurance and wholeness emitted by its postwar art. No city in northern Europe, except London, is more impacted with history; at the same time, none speaks with such dreadful plainness of the fragility of historical memory. You see a featureless tract of new buildings in an American city and merely sigh with boredom; the same tract in Berlin is raised on the rubble and corpses of 1945 -- the new is also a tomb...
Just when Berlin painting got hot with collectors in and out of Germany, its expressive energies were diverted into the task of conserving attitudes and maintaining production. Today neoexpressionism, the obsession of the early '80s, has run its course and is nearly as dead as mutton. (Will Baselitz keep painting people upside-down for another decade? Who cares?) But it left behind a small number of masterpieces, some of which are in this show. Neoexpressionism also left behind a quantity of unresolved questions, such as its degree of aesthetic success and its relation to American abstract expressionism, that are scarcely...
...Berlin' s remarkable rebirth as a postwar center of modernism is surveyed in an ambitious show at the Museum of Modern...