Word: modernist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Manhattan-based Meier, 50, is an unrepentant modernist, an outstanding exponent of rational, functional architecture in the tradition of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. "I am often labeled a disciple of Le Corbusier," Meier says. "Sure, I think he was the greatest architect of the century. But then I am also a disciple of Borromini, and I'm affected no less by Bramante and Bernini, whose work I studied in Rome." Indeed, both lines of influence are visible in Meier's work. His buildings reflect Le Corbusier's interplay of geometric forms, and they...
...style entitled them to the respect given novelists and painters. In 1958, at 26, he directed The 400 Blows, brought the new wave of film makers to its crest and became a budding auteur. With fellow New Wavers Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, Truffaut yanked film into the modernist age. No longer would the screen serve merely as a window through which the spectator sees "real people." Now it could show anything, in any and all fashions. Time could be stretched or collapsed, as in Jules et Jim; the narrative could be interrupted for capricious movie references...
Gauguin talked and wrote incessantly about being a primitive man-a condition he identified with that of an artist, a mind instinctively coupled to spirits, ancestors and myths. This defined his importance to modernist primitivism. But his work treated tribalism as spectacle, like the imported "native" villages and trophy walls featured in French colonial exhibitions...
...African works did not need to be masterpieces of their own style. The face of Matisse's Portrait of Madame Matisse, 1913, possibly one of the dozen greatest portraits of the 20th century, was based on a mediocre Fang mask from Gabon. Sometimes, though, a modernist work would take off from an African object of the first rank. Such was the case with Picasso's bronze of Marie-Therese Walter, 1931, whose erotically swollen blimp of a nose is based on an effigy he owned of the fertility goddess Nimba from the Baga. The sight of these...
...Washington's National Gallery. The phenomenal attendance at the show-124,000 people since July 1-indicates that the paintings are still as much fun to look at as they are instructive to contemplate. And in the case of the great master of the movement, Delacroix, and its modernist heirs, Matisse and Kandinsky, Orientalism remains a source of bedazzling beauty...