Word: modernist
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From the start John had a spooky, modernist poise. His taut mouth, his appraising eyes made him the group's soul and wit as surely as McCartney became its prime musical mover. Cynical, cool, Lennon was the eye of sanity in the Beatlemania hurricane. Asked, during the first U.S. tour, when the Beatles found time to rehearse their songs, he replied, "We wrote 'em; we recorded 'em; we play 'em every day. What do you rehearse? Smilin'--that's all we rehearse." His edginess suggested a roiling interior life; you could write a novel about what you imagined...
Christopher Hampton, the playwright who wrote and directed Carrington, obviously believes it was the former. Yet his account of the relationship between the half-forgotten painter and the homosexual who turned biography into a modernist art form is distant and gingerly, respectful and respectable. Reason tells us that there must have been something more needy and smothering in her nature, something more grasping and careless in his, than Hampton shows us. After all, Dora did marry a handsome youth not because she was smitten with him but because Lytton was. Yet their menage a trois is presented blandly...
...Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, was one of the three founding fathers of 20th century abstract painting. The period 1910-20, when their ideas were in their first messianic flood, is a long way from us now, and the very idea of abstract art has lost some of its old modernist prestige; nobody supposes it could have become, as its makers and early evangelists supposed, the ultimate art form, the end of art history. And yet Mondrian remains an artist of extreme importance, not only because of the historic inventiveness of his pictures and the daring leaps of consciousness they embody...
...Hitler. Like many of the Surrealists--whose work he cordially detested--Mondrian had fled to refuge in New York in 1940 as the Nazi threat to "degenerate artists" such as himself became inescapably plain. The mere arrival of this diffident and somewhat reclusive man symbolized the passing of modernist leadership from Paris to Manhattan. Yet unlike the Surrealists, he had few American followers, and none who became painters of the first rank. Part of the paradox of Mondrian was that although he believed passionately in the "universal" character of his art, it could not be successfully imitated...
...after considering whether he'd rather die, Keaton fingers the corners of his mouth into an awful grimace. But this blank visage was a versatile comic instrument. The giant eyes spoke all manner of emotions: ardor, terror, despair, sheer mulishness. The Keaton deadpan is stoic, heroic and as thoroughly modernist as a Beckett play or a Bauhaus facade. Next to him, Chaplin is a Victorian coquette, Lloyd a glad-handing politician...