Word: modernist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cathedral is not merely stylistic. For weeks, through a mortifying, mercurial Minnesota winter, two 80-man shifts have worked six days a week to finish what is, after all, a kind of fairy-tale church. The picturesque asymmetry, however, saves the palace from seeming grave. "Ours was not a modernist solution," said Karl Ermanis, the palace's chief architect, as if there were any doubts. The designers borrowed from King Ludwig II, Piranesi, Gaudi, Maxfield Parrish and Walt Disney. There are some fetching small touches: off to one side is an ersatz ice ruin and a skull-shaped ice cave...
...series of reflections--of the world, of other people's art . . . a sense of manic cerebralism and arbitrariness, a distance, even an indifference . . . riddled with sophisticated obviousness." The work is set up like an automatic mechanism, but hand-painted in a capricious parody of pictorial richness. A load of modernist signs for sensual delight--thick, ropy color that invokes the transparency of water, spots and scribbles betokening light, bits of Matisse interiors, Dufy ports, Bonnard trees, Monet ponds--is dumped on the eye and offered for identification as quotes. Bartlett's studio was one of the places where...
...British architect James Stirling, the Sackler is surrounded by a vast array of buildings of architectural and aesthetic importance. Indeed, perhaps nowhere in America is there such a concentrated collection of historically significant buildings. Harvard has it all from the early American Georgian Massachusetts Hall to Stirling's post-modernist Sackler...
...draining of the sense of the masterpiece affects both present and past. It makes past art look ghostly and value-free, so that it can be quoted and ^ shuffled at will, without deference to the values it once embodied. Hence the postmodern assault on the chief form of classical modernist painting, abstract art. A general culture glut opens the present to a limitless eclecticism and disarms taste by making everything "interesting." And, as the critic Charles Newman argues in the most provocative book on this problem yet written by an American, The Post-Modern Aura, its net effect is inflation...
...surface. Another highly gifted artist in the area where abstraction hovers on the edge of figuration is Chicago-born Elizabeth Murray, 44. Since Frank Stella, American painting has been littered with shaped canvases, but Murray has brought a wonderful energy and flair to her use of this quintessentially late-modernist device. Her shaped panels are folded, superimposed, somewhere between collage, sculpture and origami. She wants them, as she says, "to feel as though I threw them against the wall and they came together with a purpose not that consciously controlled." The air of improvisation is deceptive. Murray has an exacting...