Word: formalization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Plainness ran deeper than taste. It sometimes grew out of religious conviction--formal severity was built into the Puritan creed, for instance. But it also sprang from the social necessities of American life: the need to make and mend things for oneself, to fit and adapt to local materials. And it acquired a political dimension as metaphor...
Copley's sense of empirical realism would be carried forward by other painters. It wasn't so long ago that people thought of John James Audubon (1785-1851) as a gifted illustrator, an "ornithological artist"--but he was far more than that. He was a great formal painter with (almost literally, one might say) an eagle eye. To create his great work The Birds of America, four volumes showing 497 species, life-size and engraved in full color on the largest sheets of paper then available, he would shoot each bird and wire up its corpse on a board...
Around 1715 a German immigrant artist named Justus Kuhn painted one of the young sons of the Maryland oligarchy, Henry Darnall III: a 10-year-old baroque doll, gazed at by an adoring slave boy in a silver collar. The balustrade behind him and the formal gardens and pavilions behind that are complete fictions. No properties in America looked like this. Kuhn was meeting the illusory desire of Colonial gentry to seem like important extensions of European culture. It would be a recurrent fantasy. Fifty years later, in Boston, one sees John Singleton Copley doing much the same in some...
...Trinity Church (1872-97) in Boston. There had been libraries too, but none as ambitious as the great Boston Public Library (1887-95), designed by McKim, Mead & White. The library was the first major public building in the neo-Italian Renaissance style that was to become de rigueur in formal architecture. It expressed the praiseworthy idea that the citizen is the reason for the state; that public architecture should be generous, bold and finely built...
...European persecution and corruption (as they saw it) and trying to set up various kinds of religious Utopias. The main tool of Catholic Spain's colonization in the Southwest was the Franciscan mission. And yet the paradoxical fact is that the U.S. has never produced a substantial body of formal religious art: many churches, many sects, many cults, but pitifully few images of enduring aesthetic value...