Word: modern
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When a man named Elie Nadelman died two years ago, his passing was barely noted. Last week Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art opened a retrospective show that went a long way to prove that Nadelman, who made two splashy successes, then tried to hide, had been one of the best sculptors the U.S. had seen...
Frank Lloyd Wright, 79, grand old man of modern architecture, thought that the Middle West would be a fine site for the nation's capital because it is "the heart of democratic impulse...
...sculptor's restless mind was bound to lead him into new ways of expression. He moved to Manhattan and took it by storm in 1917 with an exhibition of a totally different kind: a roomful of carved comments on modern life. Now Nadelman's slimmed-down Venuses did high kicks, his Jupiters wore boiled shirts and derby hats, his Muses played the piano. Critic Henry McBride described the show as "culture to the breaking point." It all but sold...
...modern art, considered as a whole, a good or a bad development...
Catastrophic Effect. Another point agreed on without much fuss was that most modern art, like most art of any period, is second-rate or worse. "We have lived," said British Critic Raymond Mortimer, "[in an art age] dominated by a few men of extraordinary imaginative power, like Matisse, Picasso and Braque. Greatly as I admire them, I think their effect on their contemporaries and juniors has been catastrophic. To distort before you can represent is like trying to dance before you can walk." But, argued Mortimer, "modern painting is no more difficult to understand than modern poetry, modern music...