Word: engagement
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Golub is 62 this year and, beyond question, the leading engagé in American painting. Yet it was not until a one-man show in 1982, his first in a New York City gallery in 20 years, that his fortunes changed. Up to then he was conventionally seen as a "Chicago artist," living in New York but tucked away on his own atoll of social irritability, far from the mainstream, best known for his activism in the Viet Nam years and for his earlier paintings of thick, eroded, archaeological figures in wounded repose or lumbering combat. But when...
...more than 20 years, Bernard Malamud has been talking like a novelist engagé. Much of his fiction has explored Jewish "ethicality," which he defines as "how Jews felt they had to live in order to go on living." In 1958, the year he published his National Book Award-winning stories, The Magic Barrel, he said, quoting Albert Camus: "The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself." He has deplored the self-devaluation of modern man that springs from his having invented the means of his own extinction. It is no surprise, then, that his eighth...
...history of social stress was negligible. The struggles between left and right in France up to Courbet's death in 1877 would have turned out very much the same whether he had painted or not. For art does not act directly on politics in the way that the engagé wing of the avantgarde, from Courbet onward, expected it to do. All it can do is provide examples of radical feeling and models of dissent, unless it simply wishes to confirm the status...