Word: modern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...thinkers contend that the Pope's rejection of birth control because it interferes with procreation is based on a static and incomplete understanding of sexuality as a merely biological function. A complete natural-law theory of intercourse should include its total significance for man within marriage. To most modern couples, it is more important as an expression of love than as a method of procreating children...
Cioran believes that Western civilization is today at a stage of helpless paralysis. Modern man, he writes, is aware that every action eventually negates itself, every profound idea will give rise to another refuting it, and that every revolution leads to inevitable counterrevolution. Even nihilism and atheism are false options, since they too involve a commitment that will eventually crumble. "At our limits a God appears, or something that serves his turn," says Cioran, who is at once an unbeliever and a profoundly religious man. "I fall back on God, if only out of a desire to trample my doubts...
Constructivism began in Russia as a spidery brand of pure and formal abstraction. Some proclaim Naum Gabo as its founder; some argue that his brother, Antoine Pevsner, has an equal claim; and some urge the case of Painter Kasimir Malevich. Now Stockholm's Modern Museum has mounted an exhibit of paintings, photographs and models designed to show that Vladimir Tallin (1885-1953) was the most constructive constructivist...
...West, Tatlin ended his days in Russia as an obscure drafts man and stage designer, experimenting with Leonardo-like flying machines. (The Soviet government apparently still thinks so little of him that it refused to lend any work to the Stockholm show.) But in retrospect, argues the Modern Museum's Pontus Hulten, "Tatlin is emerging ever more clearly as one of the few really great figures of 20th century art. His ideas mean more at present for many of the younger artists than Picasso or the surrealists...
John Osborne, who initiated the modern English theatrical renaissance with Look Back in Anger, threatens to end it. His two new plays, Time Present and The Hotel in Amsterdam, are sad, sour, personal-and curiously oblique and lethargic. Osborne has never been much of a plot shaper, relying instead on arias of invective and hysteria. He is as much at the mercy of his voice as an operatic diva. This time his voice is overheard rather than heard. Instead of hurling anathemas, he bitches cattily. Instead of scalding, he scolds...