Word: gardists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Porter rejected the avant-gardist piety that the empirically painted figure or landscape was dead. It simply didn't accord with his convictions about how art relates to experience and conveys its "density," a favorite word. Nowhere does his work show a sign of the metaphysical yearnings of the New York school, still less its primitivism. Porter's was very much a modernist vision, but classically so; its main source was Paris, and its exemplars were the great Intimists Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. From them, as Agee notes in his catalog essay, Porter learned to "paint what you know...
...UNLIKELIEST OF SYMPHONIC success stories. The composer: a little- known Polish avant-gardist named Henryk Gorecki. The music: his Symphony No. 3, subtitled Symphony of Sorrowful Songs -- a transcendental meditation on mortality and redemption for orchestra and soprano. In three slow, slow, very slow movements lasting nearly an hour, it speaks of bleak despair yet sings of sublime hope. Against all odds, this deeply felt, quasi-liturgical piece -- composed 17 years ago but newly recorded -- is captivating a huge public on both sides of the Atlantic, far bigger than most serious compositions ever reach...
...driving a taxi until the zeitgeist caught up with him and collaborator Robert Wilson a few years later. Since then, Glass has scored with such operas as Satyagraha (his masterpiece) and Akhnaten. But with the Met's imprimatur on The Voyage, Glass's long journey from obscure avant- gardist to mainstream cultural icon has been culminated...
...brisk, bold spectacle, a radical new look at a beloved full-length classic, The Sleeping Beauty. It's not perversely set in a Paris slum or Sherwood Forest, as an avant-gardist might have done. The sumptuous fairy-tale illusion, as well as almost all Petipa's choreography, has been retained. But The Sleeping Beauty is usually a dozy night at the ballet -- a prologue and three acts with three intermissions. Peter Martins' $2.8 million version, unveiled at New York City Ballet in the past two weeks, is in two acts, with several smart cuts and breathtakingly fast transitions between...
...ideologically determined the "revolutionary" view of 20th century art has been. One of the pernicious illusions about modernism lies in treating it as a continuous struggle against the past, as though every real artist were his own Oedipus. In fact, the house of inspiration is much larger than avant-gardist rhetoric has ever allowed. The great transformers of art history, like Picasso or Matisse, were also its great conservators. The idea that one tradition was killed stone-dead in 1907, when Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and that another was born from the act, is nonsense. Perhaps there...