Word: modernist
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Much of his greatest work, such as New York City's Guggenheim Museum, is definitively 20th century, yet doesn't fit easily into the standard modernist canon -- Wright's buildings are too craftsmanlike, too exuberant, too strange. Was he the greatest architect of the 19th century (as the young Philip Johnson twittingly called him) or the first great one of the 20th? Even as he was, years ahead of his time, denuding interiors and dreaming up schemes for mass- produced housing, he loathed the new abstract art from its beginning. Johnson planned to include Wright in his epochal 1932 Museum...
Just as Wright was a modernist who didn't like the rubric, so too was he a prototypical modern figure in all the meretricious pop senses. He was a child of a dysfunctional family. He wore long hair and dressed expensively and eccentrically for effect: broad-brimmed hat, cape, velvet suit with lace collar and cuffs, immense bows, tassled cummerbunds, high heels. He was not just an adulterer but a free-love ideologue. He was a media celebrity; trains and theater curtains were held for him. And he marketed his fame: during the Depression he started charging devotees to come...
European modernism "primitivized" Johnson, as though a feedback loop were running from the Cubists' and Expressionists' use of tribal African art to a black artist in a Danish fishing village. "I myself feel like a primitive man," he told an interviewer in 1935, echoing the modernist founding fathers (Gauguin, Van Gogh), "like one who is at the same time both a primitive and a cultured painter." In essence, as the sculptor Martin Puryear points out in the catalog, European modernism let Johnson see himself anew; it provoked him into negotiating "his racial dilemma as a black artist moving between several...
...these attributes couldn't turn him into a major modernist, they certainly make him an artist worth revisiting. Hence the retrospective of paintings jointly organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, which runs at the Whitney Museum in New York City until the end of August...
...given to sudden shifts of style, but as the art historian Michael Quick points out in the show's useful catalog, his response to the transatlantic avant-garde was to get interested in theory, a fact that "removes Bellows from the Ashcan School context and places him among the modernist painters of his generation...