Word: modern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This suits the curatorial temper of the Met's 20th century department very well. Its stress lies on connoisseurship and comparison, rather than on telling the whole story of 20th century art. The Met's modern collection is not equal to that task anyway. Apart from decorative arts and furniture, it consists of some 6,000 works and is smaller than the Whitney's; it hardly begins to compare in scope and depth with MOMA's 65,000 objects...
...Director Philippe de Montebello is careful to point out that the museum has collected and shown the work of contemporary artists for the past half-century and that modernism -- early, middle, late and post -- is part of its mandate as an encyclopedic museum. True, up to a point; but its early relations with modern art were never enthusiastic, and during the crucial years in which great modernist collections could still be formed for not much money -- from 1930 to 1965 -- it fudged the issue of commitment. Despite two bequests totaling $250,000 given early in the century by Retailer George...
...returning American grown accustomed to the civility and efficiency of modern Japan, the U.S. seems to have become a quagmire of bureaucracy, ineptitude, mean spirit and lackadaisy. In Los Angeles, New York, Miami and other cities, the repatriate is appalled and depressed by the lack of efficiency and of simple courtesy and caring...
...choreographer, Martins has been quietly moving along classical lines. Not for him the currently fashionable crosscutting of ballet with jazz and modern elements. At his best -- in such works as Les Petits Riens, Calcium Light Night, Concerto for Two Solo Pianos, Eight Easy Pieces -- he is an agile craftsman with some surprising moves and a dry, idiosyncratic drollery. At other times he can be boring and even awkward, uneasy in filling the stage and expanding it. Premiering on the same bill as Les Petits Riens was a futile exercise called Ecstatic Orange, set to a bombinating neo-Stravinsky score...
...almost as soon as it was finished in 1497. The surface cracked because Da Vinci used an experimental primer on the wall. Then came the ravages of flooding, the cutting of a doorway, clumsy restoration and Allied bombing during World War II. But the latest attacks have come from modern tourists...