Word: bernini
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...functionless square of glass and black steel that was Mies van der Rohe's chief legacy to Germany. This Prussian pantheon, overlooking the bombed-out paddocks where Hitler's chancellery once stood, is as perfectly suited to a constructivist show as St. Peter's is to Bernini's papal tombs; box and contents are one. The idealism, the formal absolutism and the faith in a new social order, coupled with the abstracted indifference to verifiable human needs that lay at the core of the constructivist enterprise, are all written large on its grid...
...common as seagulls; the rarities are old. A special aura clings to the late works of old men who can sum up a lifetime's deposit of knowledge in a final burst of invention. One thinks of Rembrandt's late self-portraits, of Titian at 90 or Bernini at 75; or, in our century, of Henri Matisse, who died in 1954 at the age of 85. The last two decades of his life were increasingly spent on making works in paper. Ensconced in the south of France, first at Nice and later in the town of Vence...
...centuries it was a habit of Popes to collect modern religious art. Up to the papacy of Urban VIII, who gave Bernini carte blanche to transform the face of Rome, the Vatican had a use for the best art of its time: magnificence as propaganda. The results, strung through exhausting miles of galleries and culminating in Raphael's stanze and Michelangelo's Sistine frescoes, fill the Vatican Museum. But this lofty tradition of patronage ebbed away, and by 1900 most official religious art was stranded in a sludge of gaudy plaster piety. With the exception of the gloomy...
...example, two Rothko paintings were sold to the Liechtenstein firm of Galleria Bernini (two of whose directors also sit on the boards of four Marlborough shells). The Galleria paid $140,000 for them, of which the estate received $84,000. But Mrs. Paul Mellon wanted those very Rothkos so ardently, Lloyd testified, that Marlborough bought them back from Galleria Bernini for a whopping $420,000 and then resold them to her for that amount. "Since the price was so high," Lloyd said with benign altruism, "I didn't want to profit from it." Yet if the sale...
...that has no pretension to being heroic. He implies that there is nothing to be learned from these self-conscious monuments to good taste. Rather he looks to the more low-brow, eclectic architecture of the strip as a source of style. Not pure Bauhaus but Bauhaus Hawaiian, Yamasaki-Bernini, and International...