Word: etruscans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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These cloth shells also have their distinct grace. Several figures of circus performers, riding on iron-wire wheels, refer to Giacometti's famous charioteer and, through that, back to common sources in Etruscan antiquity; the precarious poise of the acrobat's body is part of Abakanowicz's general imagery of human vulnerability and risk...
...artists' experience in Rome or Naples, surfaces elsewhere in Ribera's work, sometimes in a disguised form. Looking at the great white belly-bulge of his Drunken Silenus, 1626, one sees it as gross and comic. Yet there may be something more behind it; namely, the sarcophagus figures of Etruscan bigwigs, each displaying his un-ideal paunch, a common sight around Rome...
...less interested in "locked" and unified structures than one thinks. The ring of figures in Dance (II), 1909-10, refers back to a long tradition of representations of Bacchanalian dances, from the ancient Greeks through to Poussin. The color is almost as simple and emblematic as that of an Etruscan vase: blue sky, green billowing earth, red flesh inflected with deeper, Indian-red drawing. It could not be more vivid or explicit, or better attuned to the fresco-like scale of the canvas. And yet how provisional these dancers seem, compared with their ancestors; how deliberately imperfect, within the brusque...
...museums, get on Poplar Avenue and head toward the Pink Palace Museum--one of the few museums in the world that still has lots of buttons to PUSH. If you visit in late spring, they'll have much-hyped Etruscan exhibit. If not, stop by on a weekend and see the miniature circus...
...point is not idle, and many scholars would rush to defend it. Still, when an Etruscan tomb is emptied, a church desecrated, a Mayan temple bulldozed and a museum Vermeer yanked from its frame, it is hard to see how rich societies, let alone poor ones, can enjoy art in peace for long. In turning a blind eye to the canker that feeds on it, the art world is losing security, losing art and losing its soul...