Word: cowart
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Taken to the extreme, this principle can mean ignoring or overriding the patient's express wishes. When Dax Cowart was critically burned in a propane- gas explosion near Henderson, Texas, he begged a passing farmer for a gun with which to kill himself. On his way to the hospital, he pleaded with the medic to let him die. For weeks his life hung by a thread. For more than a year, against his will, he endured excruciating treatment: his right eye and several fingers were removed, his left eye was sewn shut. His pain and his protests were unrelenting...
...National Gallery of Art in Washington has filled it, persuasively, radiantly and definitively, with a show of 171 paintings done by Matisse in his early Nice years, assembled by Art Historians Jack Cowart and Dominique Fourcade. It should dispel any lingering suspicion that between 1916 and 1930, even average Matisses got as complacent as most Renoirs. Indeed, some of Matisse's greatest work was done in those years. Why was this acknowledged so grudgingly, or not at all? For "ideological reasons," Co-Curator Fourcade argues, springing from a "modernist obsession" with Matisse's largely posthumous role as prophet of Paris...
...opened in June at the St. Louis Art Museum, and will go to New York City's PS. 1, a gallery housed in a former public school, in September, is of great interest: it is the first systematic museum show of this material in America. Art Historian Jack Cowart, who assembled it, wisely refrained from trying to cover everyone. Instead, he chose five "exemplary" figures, the most influential and (although his catalogue essay waffles on this point) the aesthetically superior ones: Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz and A.R. Penck...
Penck's obsessive loquacity and mock-ritual imagery are apt to cause inflation. "He is like the North Pole," rhapsodizes Curator Cowart, "that place which attracts the navigational magnetic compass from afar but repels and disorients it when approached." The more modest truth, for those with unwiggled needles, is that Penck's imagery is often so obscure that he seems to feel no special responsibility to the system he deploys. A lot of the paintings are mumbo jumbo, and their formal attributes can be remarkably trite-cliché figure-ground reversals, careless scrawly drawing...
...parodying the most recognizable traits of textbook modernism as reflected by its satirists, Lichtenstein may certainly be said to display a post-modernist sensibility; but what else is going on? Not, it appears, very much, and to call these paintings "visionary," as Cowart does, is to overrate them. Rather, they are grounded on a somewhat smug familiarity with the power of cliche. That, of course, is one dilemma of art education...