Word: modernist
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...Modern Art in New York City, and were in fact the first paintings by a black artist to enter MOMA's collection. It seemed to both Alfred Barr of MOMA and Duncan Phillips that Lawrence's series represented a unique conjunction of black experience, history painting and a modernist idiom. They were right. From Benjamin West to Robert Rauschenberg, American art is sown with attempts, varying between utter bathos and success, to image forth the American story. And for reasons that are lamentably obvious, practically none of these were created by blacks, until Lawrence appeared...
Then he started doing other pictorial styles as subjects of his own. Picasso, Fernand Leger, Carlo Carra, Max Beckmann and so on. Then kitsch Modernism, as imagined by cartoonists. The trouble with these versions of Modernist classics 'n' clinkers is their sameness. After a while, it isn't very interesting to be shown that just about anything can be turned into a Lichtenstein, congealed in his cryogenic style. There's none of the engaged imagination, the sense of a transforming mind at work, that one gets in, say, Miro's wild versions of a 17th century Dutch interior, down...
...women almost unbelievably concerned with art and confident of their ability to produce it. City Poet recalls an era when a dispute over the relative merits of Eliot and Stevens could strain a friendship, when a pro-Yeats faction at the Advocate battled with a pro-Auden contingent of modernist mavericks, and when the smoke-filled Grolier Bookshop was a bona-fide artists' hangout. All of these pretensious goings-on would be laughable if they hadn't spawned some of the most talented artists in the nation, and Gooch does an excellent job of evoking the air of social frivolity...
...major work for string orchestra from 1964; and the brief Three Pieces in the Old Style (1963) for strings. From Elektra Nonesuch come two recent string quartets, Already It Is Dusk (No. 1) and Quasi una Fantasia (No. 2). The result is a fuller, rounder picture of an uncompromising modernist who just may be the Bruckner...
Larkin made a life's work of offering the unfashionable alternative -- joking about it but meaning it too. His verse, unlike Hughes', was resolutely un-modernist; he clung to the notion that poems should be clearly written in everyday language and should avoid posturing and pretension at all costs -- though, in his hands, that left plenty of room for craft and eloquence. He steered clear of London and the literary life, spending his career as a librarian in provincial cities. Formidably shy, he never married, remaining deeply attached to a burdensome mother until her death at 91, when...