Word: essays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ESSAY...
...Elderfield points out in a catalog essay, Matisse's luck with the critics has always been peculiar. At the outset, part of the tiny modern-art public in Paris thought his work incoherent, ugly. Others, like Gauguin's friend Maurice Denis, praised its absolutist devotion to "painting in itself, the pure act of painting." But there was never a shortage of critics who saw Matisse as a kind of magisterial lightweight. "It is a modiste's taste," wrote the poet Andre Salmon in 1912, "whose love of color equals the love of chiffon...
What horror! There are always folk, especially in puritan America, who think pleasure is an unworthy goal of art. Academe is full of ideological nerds who can't look at a Matisse still life without planning an essay on the gender division of the work force in the Nice fruit market; how about The Commodified Fig: Reification As Metaphor in Matisse...
...ESSAY...
School Ties is an entertaining but thoughtful film about football, high school and intolerance. It is also an essay on the nature of power. Besides making you empathize with the characters on screen, School Ties will make you think about the larger social issues involved...