Word: lyrical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Aspects of the work of older American artists recur in Porter's work: Marsden Hartley's love of bony mass, Edward Hopper's treatment of light. But there were very great differences. Porter was a more nuanced and daring colorist than Hartley; his world is more lyric than Hopper's, and on the whole untouched by melancholy. It is also more generalized in treatment. In a large painting like Island Farmhouse, 1969, the white weatherboard asserts itself in a blast of light like a Doric temple; the lines of shadow are a burning visionary yellow; everything, from the angular...
...recorded two albums of Holiday's songs, encourages -- up to a point. Says she: "I can't imagine what it would have been for me if she hadn't been there." Like Holiday's, Lincoln's voice can be harsh. But she invariably finds the emotional center of a lyric, singing every syllable clearly enough to satisfy the standards of a BBC announcer...
...with such works as Hudson River Landscape, Smith's pre-eminence in American sculpture was complete: he could draw with steel in space with as much fluency as with pencil on paper, creating metaphors that mingle the organic and the mechanical in an unstoppable lyric eloquence. He imagined his work connected to the heroic tradition of American technology. "My aim," he wrote in 1952, "is the same as in locomotive building: to arrive at a given functional form in the most efficient manner." Sculpture's iron age, in such hands, was also a golden...
Giorgione appeals more to modern taste because his imagery was more mysterious and poetic, and the idea that painting should mimic the effects of lyric or pastoral poetry, ut pictura poesis, was a favorite 16th century dictum. There is a word for it, Giorgionesque, an allusive quality that comes through even in conventional subjects, such as the exquisite portrait of a young knight surrounded by the gleaming black weapons of his vocation, a dense still life with religious overtones (the handle and pommel of the sword are also a cross), the bony silence of the knight's face contrasting with...
Baerwald is assured and savvy enough to mock his own obsessions (notably in AIDS & Armageddon: "I dream assassination/ I hallucinate cash") and to give even his most dour lyric excursions a solid foundation of rhythm throughout. You might not be able to party down to Triage, but you sure can dance to it -- right over the edge...