Word: expressionistic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...main event of the past two or three years, so far as the New York art world is concerned, has been the "rebirth" of European art-mainly young, German and Italian, expressionist in mode and flirtatiously eclectic in tone. The spectrum of achievement runs from mere operators like Salome to deeply serious artists of the caliber of Anselm Kiefer. The fact that an American audience is paying attention to European painting once more comes as a relief, but before attention gets wholly stylized as fashion, it is worth remembering that England is part of Europe and that some English painters...
Life, Death, the Zeitgeist, and above all the tragic though profitable condition of being a Great Artist. It is big, and stuffed with clunky references to other Great Art, from Caravaggio to Joseph Beuys. Its imagery is callow and solemn, a Macy's parade of expressionist bric-a-brac: skulls, bullfights, crucifixes, severed heads. It includes portraits of the likes of Baudelaire, Artaud, Burroughs and other connoisseurs of crisis. It serves up, by implication, the image of Schnabel himself as a young Prince of Aquitaine, albeit a Texan one, sleepless with memory and disillusion, contemplating the wrenched spare parts...
DIED. Jack Tworkov, 82, revered member of the New York school of abstract expressionist painting; in Provincetown, Mass. An admirer of Cézanne, Tworkov worked with bold yet lyrical brushstrokes to build up fields of color, which he played against one another. Like many abstract expressionists, he found his subject in the act of painting. He once said, "My hope is to confront the picture without a ready technique or prepared attitude...
...essence of prison life is that it is boring, boring by definition and by design. Yet there are accidental Expressionist stage-set touches: Stateville's round, four-tier cell houses, each with its all-seeing gun tower at the hub; in a prison shop, a row of machine tenders, each man in a khaki shirt with WORK painted on the back; on a guard's desk a canvas bandoleer, in every numbered pouch a safety razor for daily distribution on death row; a jarring, hand-lettered sign, NO SNICKERS, that in fact refers to the commissary's candy-bar supply...
There is, however, a strand of painting that tends to miss out at both ends. It employs the human figure neither as a cooled-out sign linked to the imagery of mass media-like Katz, Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, Robert Longo-nor as a generalized hieroglyph for "expressionist" feeling, as in de Kooning or the new German painters. Such painting wants to inspect and describe the body as a real object in the world, in all its resistances, its actualities, its peculiar landscapes of pit and pore and hair. It wants to move outward from that to see its social...