Word: formalist
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...This formalist geography lesson could not last, of course. In the '80s it came apart like wet Kleenex. America has no single culture, but cultures. And so it should, since diversity is better than monotony. In any case, many ethnic Americans are still exiles within the dominant, white matrix. One painter in this show, Martin Ramirez (1885-1960), epitomized the extreme fate of the Hispanic as outsider. A migrant railroad worker from Mexico, Ramirez lost his powers of speech and became a catatonic schizophrenic in Los Angeles in 1915, was committed in 1930 and spent the last three decades...
...Paris of Kertesz's early career was the cockpit of modernism, where surrealists, Dadaists and constructivists fanned the air with their manifestos. Kertesz felt the breeze but sailed his own course. He absorbed the lessons of constructivism, without becoming an arctic formalist. His fellow Hungarian expatriate Laszlo Moholy-Nagy could turn people into compositional load bearers upholding a grand design. Kertesz linked his formal sense to benign temperament. Joining elegant compositions to gentle human anecdotes, he achieved a formalism with the juice still flowing...
...book is written in the novel-like, no-attribution form that Woodward and Bernstein did much to popularize--and for which they took much flak--in The Final Days, their account of the end of the Nixon Administration. As American Lawyer editor Steven Brill has written, the style irritates formalist journalists who cringe if no "he recalled" or "she added" appears after an incident...
...Poussin over again from nature. Welliver's ambition, at least in part, is to do the same with Pollock. Such landscapes are "allover" paintings, slices taken from a boundless field of pictorial incident. The apparent disorder of the view, that energetic chaos of sticks and rocks, is formalist to the last square inch...
...strategy. In color, in tonal structure, and in its contradictory lighting, Rubin argues, De Chirico's style up to 1918 "was as alien to its supposed classical, 15th century models as it was dependent on the Parisian painting of its own moment." This view of De Chirico as formalist fits all the evidence, and rids the artist of a great deal of accumulated "poetic" waffle. It also helps one to distinguish, in a way that makes sense, between De Chirico's real achievements and the long slide into mediocrity after 1918. Authentic pre-1918 De Chiricos...