Word: modernist
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Benton's own abstract paintings may not have been quite up to the level of Macdonald-Wright's, though it is difficult to judge them fairly, since he destroyed so much of his early work "to get all that modernist dirt out of my system." But it was abstraction that underwrote the system of Benton's later figurative paintings -- an abstraction based on bulging, serpentine figures derived from Michelangelo. From him, and from mannerist sources like Luca Cambiaso's block figures and El Greco's twisty saints, Benton assembled the theory of kinetic composition that would eventually alter the walls...
...single art event symbolized Russia's thawed relations to its own modernist past, it was the show at the Tretyakov Art Gallery in Moscow last winter by a painter and mystic who died in 1935, well into the Stalin era, and whose work remained buried for decades thereafter: Kasimir Malevich...
Born in Kiev in 1878, Malevich invented himself with astonishing speed. Between 1905, the year he moved to Moscow, and 1915, he ran through the gamut of early modernist styles, from pointillism to cubism. Early works like Floor Polishers, 1911-12, show his assimilative powers: this gripping image of hard labor, where every line reinforces the muscular twist of bodies and the thrust of the feet with their waxing pads on the floor, ultimately derives from Matisse's Dance. Troglodytic, pious and massive, Malevich's figures of peasants from the '20s both assert modernity and deny...
...past. From the emergence of Giotto in the 13th century to the death of Bernini in the 17th, Italian painters and sculptors ruled the European roost, setting the standards of achievement by which Western culture judged itself. By the 19th century this primacy was lost, and throughout the modernist era Italy produced no equivalents to Picasso, Matisse or Mondrian, and, of course, nothing even faintly comparable to Titian or Michelangelo...
While he calls himself a modernist, Holl has conscientiously learned backward-looking lessons about building scale. "Buildings in general are too big," he says. "I'm happy doing houses and buildings a bit bigger than houses." The two largest projects Holl has designed, a planned addition to the University of Minnesota/Twin Cities School of Architecture and a West Berlin library extension, would each be only about a tenth as big as a modest skyscraper...