Word: gothic
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...Prices have doubled in the past two years. These startling statistics were underlined last week by the breakneck rush of business at the fourth annual Art and Antiques Fair at Munich's Haus der Kunst, which 'was for many years a U.S. officers' club. 0f Gothic figures and paintings, one in four was imported from the U.S. It was a far cry from the days just after World War II, when starving German families were trading heirlooms for food, and antique treasures drained out of Germany. Last year, for the first time since the war, the flow...
...market stands today, there is simply not enough stuff available, so anything goes. Career girls and young couples invariably start with a 'genuine' baroque angel cum gilded wings. A stabilized bank account calls for a Biedermeier dining-room set. The first sign of real affluence is a Gothic Madonna-polychrome for beginners, and Riemenschneider brown for the sophisticated. Real collecting comes later...
...Shakers distrusted the ornamental; they avoided both "carpenter Gothic" and Victorian arabesques. Their furniture is functional to a T, and yet their tools are subtly shaped to charm the eye and hand. The Shaker wheelbarrow opposite, for example, looks as elegantly clean-lined as a Ferrari...
Just what this Gothic hoedown signifies is anybody's guess. Best bet is that Bergman intends it as a kind of spiritual autobiography, identifies himself both with the masked magician and the drunken actor, who dies with his battered top hat on, raving: "I always longed for a knife to free me ... Then what we call the spirit would rise up from the meaningless carcass." Cinemagician Bergman seems to see both men as despairing artists whose creative imaginations doom them to social obloquy and the distrust and disdain of hardheaded authority. What scant optimism there is in this fatalistic...
...greatest periods of art, such as the Classical and the Gothic, artists strove for an agreed-upon ideal, and innovations were few (or, if many, did not survive). But modern art relentlessly stresses the new. The result is mostly confusion, but also a degree of fermentation. Last week in Manhattan's Greenwich Village a lean, wispy-bearded man with the cheerful energy of a grasshopper was preparing something brand new in sculpture. His suitably improbable name: Len Lye. His sculptures he calls "Tangibles," but they are not meant to be touched. They vibrate...