Word: modernistically
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...academic" practices, since these were what modernism had "overthrown." High on playpen radicalism, the '60s brought a massacre of plaster casts and a general winding down of life drawing in most, though not all, American schools. Yet it is obvious by now that all the great draftsmen of the modernist era, from Seurat to Picasso, from Beckmann to De Kooning, were grounded in academic processes and could no more have done without them than a plane can do without a landing strip. Hence the paradox: a figurative revival partly spearheaded by the poorest generation of draftsmen in American history...
...draining of the sense of the masterpiece affects both present and past. It makes past art look ghostly and value-free, so that it can be quoted and ^ shuffled at will, without deference to the values it once embodied. Hence the postmodern assault on the chief form of classical modernist painting, abstract art. A general culture glut opens the present to a limitless eclecticism and disarms taste by making everything "interesting." And, as the critic Charles Newman argues in the most provocative book on this problem yet written by an American, The Post-Modern Aura, its net effect is inflation...
...Times of Joseph Stalin, which received its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1973, Wilson welded elements of painting, set design, music, ballet and pantomime into a single twelve-hour work. Many found it initially difficult to come to terms with the avant-garde's startling modernist images, such as Stalin's dance for 19 ostriches or its chorus line of caricatured black mammies swaying to the strains of On the Beautiful Blue Danube. But those who did, witnessed the foundation of much...
...wear fatigues, but the pose is not John Wayne-heroic: these American boys are spectral and wary, even slightly bewildered as they gaze southeast toward the wall. While he was planning the figures, Sculptor Frederick Hart spent time watching vets at the memorial. Hart now grants that "no modernist monument of its kind has been as succcessful as that wall. The sculpture and the wall interact beautifully. Everybody won." Nor does Lin, his erstwhile artistic antagonist, still feel that Hart's statue is so awfully trite. "It captures the mood," says Lin. "Their faces have a lost look...
DIED. Roger Sessions, 88, influential, uncompromising composer of reconditely complex orchestral, chamber and vocal works; in Princeton, N.J. Revered by fellow musicians, Sessions adapted such modernist techniques as Stravinskian neoclassicism and Schoenbergian serialism to his individual style, allowing lyricism and emotional color to come through the bursts and layers of sound. Almost all his works, however, are dense, dissonant and difficult both to perform and to listen to, with the result that some compositions waited years for premieres; among his best-known and least inaccessible works were his score for The Black Maskers (1923) and Symphony...