Word: colossi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Thrones and Colossi. To move from the grand volumes and rhythmical, steely incision of these Tlingit house posts and Eskimo masks into the world of American neoclassical sculpture is to shift to provincialism. It is also to descend from necessity into sentiment, and, in a sense, from confidence into anxiety. Compared with the pressure of ritual meaning in the best Indian art, the search for a language of classical form and Roman gravitas conducted by the professionals who rose to commemorate the American ideal after the Revolution-Horatio Greenough, Hiram Powers and Thomas Crawford-looks curiously wistful. Hiram Powers...
...main direction of U.S. sculpture, throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, was official and public. In a catalogue section titled Statues to Sculpture: 1890-1930, Art Historian Daniel Robbins gives a fascinating account of the plaster colossi produced by the cohabitation of raw new capital, laissez-faire idealism and academic talent. He also shows how the desire for emblematic icons of American history- realized by such grand-scale performers of the period as Augustus Saint-Gaudens-eventually made an accommodation with modern style through art deco. In the studios of beaux-arts figures like Saint-Gaudens...
Quite literally, Oldenburg envisions these objects--clothespins, or three-way plugs--as monuments. With the exception of the Typewriter Eraser, each has been executed on a colossal scale. These colossi are impressive: a ten-foot clothespin towers up in golden splendour, refined, stripped to bare geometric form; a 20-foot vinyl three-way plug hangs limply from the ceiling, inviting caresses. (In the present exhibit, the larger pieces are at MIT, while the drawings, for the most part, are at the ICA. The MIT part of the exhibit should be seen after the ICA portion, since the large sculptures...
Gnomes in the Garden. The experiment works, but not always as it was meant to. "The picturesque charms of Newport," writes Princeton's Hunter, "with its inexhaustible variety of visual backgrounds, should help mitigate the brute power of contemporary sculpture colossi." Mitigate is scarcely the word. The landscape sometimes annihilates the sculpture. That vast, wrinkled plane of sea fringed by blue pudding-stone bluffs is so much stronger than some of the works perched above it that objects like George Sugarman's 18-ft. Kite Castle, 1974, Alexander Calder's stabile or Robert Murray's pleated...
...wrote his mother, came "through, or rather in, a glowing light that was like melted silver on the sea." For all those months he remained plunged in a world of vivid color impressions: black earth, purple desert, the bleached bird droppings of 4,000 years running down obelisks and colossi, the deliriously blue sky. The official object of their expedition left him quite cold: he uttered a cry of conventional ecstasy at the first sight of the Sphinx and its "terrifying stare," but as for the temples, they "bore me profoundly." The living panorama of the voyage, however, made...