Word: maxfield
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Died. Maxfield Parrish, 95, Quaker-born dean of U.S. illustrators, whose diaphanous damsels, Homeric heroes, devilish dwarfs and capering clowns enlivened magazine covers (Collier's, Harper's Weekly), made dull books popular, and helped turn Jell-O and Fisk tires into bestsellers by virtue of their ads; of chronic lung disease; in Plainfield, N.H. In 1964, with a retrospective show in Manhattan, Parrish was hailed as a precursor of pop art, and responded by saying: "How can these avant-garde people get anything out of me? I'm so hopelessly commonplace." Probably his most lasting single work...
...amid Lebanon's northern mountains, he sowed bits of torn paper in his garden and waited patiently for a harvest of full leaves. The mystic did not find a cult until he moved to the U.S., where he exhibited his drawings-which blend elements of William Blake and Maxfield Parrish-and held a kind of mystical court in his Greenwich Village studio...
...years ago had an attribute not shared by the pop art of today: it was popular. The most popular of the artists of that time, Maxfield Parrish, now 93, painted book illustrations and calendars that were reproduced by the millions. College boys hung his works in their rooms amidst a clutter of crew oars, fencing foils and mooseheads. From a first cover for Harper's Weekly in 1895, he painted on to become the country's best-paid artist...
...with other modern composers, formlessness is Maxfield's most glaring flaw. In order to integrate chance into form, Maxfield cuts his tape into short segments which he then fits together without plan. In Peripateia either these segments were too short or the original tape had no contrasts. I felt that the piece was static and monotonous because it lacked 'events'--that is, a sequences of random happenings that would give a sense of succession of ideas or moods. At its worst, Maxfield's music has an over-blown, almost Mahlerian grandiloquence...
...Maxfield does display a rather healthy reaction against the worship of incommunicable individual creativity practiced by some of his colleagues. Their romanticism, he feels, is merely a narcissistic exhibition of a self-assumed superiority. Maxfield has the modest aim of stimulating his audience, but yet his self-denigration cannot fully hide a potentiality for deeper expression...