Word: modernists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DIED. Kenzo Okada, 79, Japanese-American painter and critically admired modernist who combined a gently mystical Oriental mood with a Western abstract style; of a heart attack; in Tokyo. One of the first Japanese artists to work in the U.S. after World War II, Okada often painted five canvases at once, using pieces of wood, rollers, fingers. And, he said, "of course, I also have brushes...
Croce's condemnations are rigorous and vivid. Of the late modernist Doris Humphrey she writes: "Humphrey was a structuralist who could reduce a Bach concerto to a nest of mixing bowls; the bowls were brown." Of the immensely popular work of the Netherlands Dance Theater's Jiŕi Kylian: "A favorite form of pas de trois is the woman pulled and dragged on a steeplechase course between two men. It stands for rape, for exaltation...
...phase of his work-the so-called pittura metafisica-lasted until about 1918. Thereafter, De Chirico changed. He wanted to become, and almost succeeded in becoming, a classicist. He imagined himself to be the heir of Titian. Rejected by the French avantgarde, he struck back with disputatious critiques of modernist degeneracy; for the next 60 years of his life, he remained an obdurate though not very skillful academic painter. He even took to signing his work Pictor Optimus (the best painter). The sheer scale of his failure-if that is the word for it-is almost as fascinating...
...curatorial triumph, supported by a catalogue that surely will become a standard text on the artist. And his paintings-not incidentally-are of ravishing beauty. For the past 70 years, De Chirico's city has been one of the capitals of the modernist imagination. It is a fantasy town, a state of mind, signifying alienation, dreaming and loss. Its elements are so well known by now that they fall into place as soon as they are named, like jigsaw pieces worn by being assembled over and over again: the arcades, the tower, the piazza, the shadows, the statue...
...treat De Chirico solely as a dream-merchant precursor of surrealism does his early work a grave injustice. In his organization of the show, William Rubin contends that De Chirico survives as a painter within a specifically modernist framework, whose standards were generated in the 30 years before 1914 in Paris. That was "the city par excellence of art and the intellect," as De Chirico wrote, where "any man worthy of the name of artist must exact the recognition of his merit." Paris took young De Chirico, as it took young Chagall, and turned him from a naive provincial fabulist...