Word: ivans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...immediate past was marked by an exhilarating sense of intellectual risk, their glimpses of the future seem wholly prophetic. Time and again in LACMA's exhibition, one sees paintings and sculpture, modest in scale though not in ambition, that anticipate Western artists by half a century. Ivan Kliun (1873-1943) had most of Ellsworth Kelly's best ideas by 1917. Olga Rozanova's Color Construction, Green on White, 1917, a vertical stripe down the middle of a field, is a Barnett Newman "zip" 30 years before Newman, and her exquisite collages in the suite entitled The Universal...
Young Caroline meets Ivan during a Roman holiday in the late 1950s. At 29, he is one of those postwar perennial students, a Fulbright scholar studying the relationship of architecture to the rise and fall of empires. His real talent, he believes, lies elsewhere. "I think," he says to Caroline, "I would be good at telling people how to go about getting what they want. That's if they know what they want to begin with...
...that moment, Caroline wants to get this attractive intellectual to bed. Ivan is in no hurry; he charms and tantalizes her with food, wine and graceful erudition. Rather than toss coins in a fountain, he guides her to the Campidoglio to see the caged she-wolf, symbol of the mythical beast that suckled Romulus and Remus. The animal, "glowering from slate-gray eyes that looked at once treacherous and ready to weep," suddenly howls in their faces...
...point, richly made throughout the novel, is that a perceptive Ivan was drawn to a wildness just beneath Caroline's cool, efficient exterior. She, in turn, understands that Ivan's passionate statements about art and politics cloak a chilly, analytical intelligence. It is this intelligence that ironically gives emotional and physical depth to their marriage...
...Ivan may appear a feminist idea of the perfect mate. He does not interfere with Caroline's career or challenge her separateness. When a teaching job takes her away for three months, he stays behind and cooks for their daughter. Yet he is complex, touchy about his freedom, easy to anger and a bit violent. It is assumed that he has an occasional affair. Caroline does too, though her liaisons are never confused with the authentic intimacies of her home life...