Word: modernistically
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That, stripped of the nudging and stylistic razzle-dazzle that pad the book to length, is the gist of Wolfe's argument. It looks familiar, as travesties must. The dismantling of modernist dogma has been going on for ten years or more; it has been a prime staple of architectural criticism and practice throughout one of the most intense periods of building in American history. Everyone, including Wolfe, knows something about it. But he brings nothing new to the argument except, perhaps, a kind of supercilious rancor and a free-floating hostility toward the intelligentsia. The late bird...
...stone, or even the broken antique fragment. It was a way of asserting the power of reduction, a demonstration that the expressive power of human form could be so concentrated as to drop, without loss, such usual signifiers of emotion as the head. This predicted the fragmentation of later modernist sculpture, just as surely as Rodin's ideas about organic form clearly pointed forward to Arp and Moore. "The truth of my figures," he remarked, "instead of being merely superficial, seems to blossom from within to the outside, like life itself...
...parodying the most recognizable traits of textbook modernism as reflected by its satirists, Lichtenstein may certainly be said to display a post-modernist sensibility; but what else is going on? Not, it appears, very much, and to call these paintings "visionary," as Cowart does, is to overrate them. Rather, they are grounded on a somewhat smug familiarity with the power of cliche. That, of course, is one dilemma of art education...
...even have been attempted by an American museum 15 years ago; the subject was too grossly out of sync with opinion. It was mandatory, for instance, to see an artist like Manet-with his dandyism and blague, his risky spontaneity and breadth of touch-as a father of later modernist painting. The fact that he also had deep affinities with "retrograde" realists of his own time, and was a 19th century rather than a "proto-20th century" artist, was sometimes played down...
...have forgotten that the libido exists, in part because these scenes are the film's only submissions to spontaneity. This Postman is a true period piece-not 1934, but the early '70s, when American and European directors were investigating functions of the apocalyptic orgasm from behind a modernist screen. Like Last Tango in Paris, Rafelson's Postman shows what his doomed lovers do but does not tell who they are. Their willful sex scenes are explicit and incandescent; their motivations are elliptical smoke signals viewed from the other side of Death Valley...