Word: lyric
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...material shapes. Hence the desire to paint archetypal forms, so that Mondrian's rectangles and Kandinsky's floating circles are to be read as a kind of sacred geometry, pyramid power in paint. Hence, too, the peculiar use of light by artists like Franticek Kupka -- a shuddering, lyric vibration that implies the sublimities of landscape without describing them. Then there is the imagery of duality and paired opposites -- light-dark, vertical-horizontal -- and of synesthesia, whereby colors correspond to musical tones, or textures to tastes...
LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT Jonathan Miller's swift, funny rendering of an often lugubrious work was not so much a revival as a rediscovery. It proved that O'Neill's lyric family tragedy can work as gritty naturalism...
...whom annual Christmas telecasts of the treacly Amahl and the Night Visitors were a cultural high point. Goya, however, is a new low: a brazen melange of elements from Traviata and Puccini's La Rondine, served up with music that is a degenerate descendant of the once proud lyric tradition. Sung in English, Goya may be the piece that writes fine to Italian opera...
...next, enjoying the floods and diaphanous veils of color, the sheaves of burning stripes, the technical control, and marvels once more at the unpredictability of shifts in the pecking order of the American art world. Whatever painting may be argued to depend on today, it is not the lyric disembodied stain. Its possibilities for the future turned out to be not just unimagined but non-existent. History, fickle jade, balked at this fence and took a turn. One cannot imagine future painters mining Louis' work for motifs and ideas, the way Jackson Pollock's was mined by Louis and other...
...emerged the chief form of American museum art in the early '60s: The Watercolor That Ate the Art World. Of course, one could hardly come right out with it and say the works of Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis (quite apart from the thousands of yards of lyric acrylic on unprimed duck done by their many forgotten imitators) were basically huge watercolors. But there was little in the soak-stain methods of color-field painting that did not seek and repeat watercolor effects. The big difference lay in the size, the curtness and (sometimes) the grandeur...