Word: michelangelos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Reni was the leading Bolognese artist of the 17th century. For nearly 200 years after his death, he was adored by a long line of connoisseurs and tourists who held him to have been angelically inspired, the greatest painter of his age: as famous in his own way as Michelangelo, Leonardo, Van Gogh or Picasso. Percy Bysshe Shelley thought that if some cataclysm destroyed Rome, the loss of Raphael and Guido Reni would "be alone regretted...
...difficult to judge them fairly, since he destroyed so much of his early work "to get all that modernist dirt out of my system." But it was abstraction that underwrote the system of Benton's later figurative paintings -- an abstraction based on bulging, serpentine figures derived from Michelangelo. From him, and from mannerist sources like Luca Cambiaso's block figures and El Greco's twisty saints, Benton assembled the theory of kinetic composition that would eventually alter the walls of the Midwest. It would alter abstract painting itself, since his preoccupation with surge and flow got across to Pollock...
...invoked in Kansas City, where his latter years were spent; and most students of American art history knew that he had been the teacher (and to no small extent, the substitute father) of Jackson Pollock at the Art Students League in New York City. But actual interest in the Michelangelo of Neosho, Mo., was fairly low, which mirrored the poor esteem into which American regionalism, the populist art movement that in the '30s had tried to assuage the miseries of the Depression, had slumped. From the late '40s onward, regionalism had come to look cornball, and its project, which...
...sculptors ruled the European roost, setting the standards of achievement by which Western culture judged itself. By the 19th century this primacy was lost, and throughout the modernist era Italy produced no equivalents to Picasso, Matisse or Mondrian, and, of course, nothing even faintly comparable to Titian or Michelangelo...
Piazza della Signoria is in a state of upheaval these days. The piazza that has been the center of Florentine life since before Medici times, the space chosen by Michelangelo for his exquisite statue David, has been ripped up and fenced in. The current David, a copy, stands forlornly in front of a partially scaffolded Palazzo Vecchio. Cosimo I, the young Medici ruler who sits mid- square atop his bronze horse, gazes down on an ugly, corrugated plastic roof covering a third of the square...