Word: modern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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TIME's editors have observed an increasing number of stories that involve a conflict between modern scientific and social trends on the one hand and traditional values on the other. The list of such subjects is long. It includes everything from test-tube conception to right-to-die legislation, insider trading to South African sanctions. In many cases, despite detailed coverage and full public discussion of opposing views, urgent moral and philosophical questions linger and continue to trouble the American conscience...
Born in Mecca, Khashoggi grew up with the confidence that comes from being the firstborn son in a country where the eldest boy is the prince of the family. His father, Dr. Mohammad Khashoggi, was the chief physician to King Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia. From his father, Khashoggi says, he learned the difference between compassion and realism, as well as the value of giving as a prelude to receiving. Khashoggi recalls that one oppressive summer afternoon when he was eight, he discovered a beggar asleep on the front steps. Knowing of Islam's emphasis on charity...
...religious experience in the visual arts. The other news is that spiritualism is so arcane and culturally eccentric that it may make the paintings look even less accessible than when they were seen as "pure" form. Yet the timing of this show is brilliant. Like late Imperial Rome, modern America is riddled with superstition, addicted to gurus, Sibyls and purveyors of every kind of therapeutic nostrum. One does not need a planchette to deduce that an exhibition which demonstrates as clearly as this one how great painters like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky conceived their art in terms of thought...
...mannered Rosicrucians and a little- known visionary named Hilma af Klint to Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe and Jasper Johns. Nor does it leave out that durable old alchemist, Marcel Duchamp. It also features several vitrines of early mystical, cosmological and alchemical texts known to have been studied by modern artists, some of whose illustrations are of astonishing beauty and suggestiveness. But its main focus, inevitably, is on the inventors of abstract art: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kupka, Kazimir Malevich -- all represented by remarkable works. One would have to go a long way before finding a more intriguing Kandinsky, for instance, than...
...looking like resolute materialists whose pared-down insistence on the autonomy of formal means suggests no "spiritual" aspect (as defined by the earlier parts of the show) at all. But this is a brave curatorial labor all the same, a stimulating and important move in the general rereading of modern art that is so much a part...