Word: modernists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Every painting in the show is kitsch by high-Modernist standards. And it is not easy to don the expectations of the original audience. The paintings presuppose a knowledge of Russian society, and above all a saturation with its period propaganda, that few in the West can claim. Why did it matter for political purposes that the writer Maxim Gorky should be depicted taking lessons on the rifle range from Marshal Voroshilov, the commissar of war? It mattered because Gorky, though a literary favorite and a devoted friend of Lenin's, was opposed to shooting, and this bothered Stalin...
...worthwhile to remember that such art -- which, mutatis mutandis, has also been the formal state style of Hitler, Mao Zedong and not a few minor figures including Saddam Hussein -- has meant more to more people in the past 60 years than all the sanctified Modernist styles, from Fauvism to Pop, rolled together. Like Modernism's, its roots lay in the 19th century. If Modernism grew from Manet, Monet and Cezanne, Socialist Realism emerged from their conservative opposition -- the academic and narrative work that was the institutional art of Europe a century ago. In Russia the hugely popular landscapes and genre...
...pictures (failed, however, by standards to which most living artists don't aspire), is the best realist painter alive. To watch the development of his work -- even in the abbreviated form of one show -- is like watching a wily cock salmon compelled upstream by instinct, against the cataracts of modernist history, following its desires. Most of the major stylistic events in art since 1900, starting with late Cezanne and going on through Cubism to abstraction in its various forms, have had no apparent impact on Freud's painting. He is a rebuke to superficial notions of determinism...
American official taste -- late-modernist taste -- shows no real or sustained interest in artists who are prepared to make a life's work out of the challenge of imbuing real figures and objects with strong plastic meaning in deep space. There are a few exemptions, such as Philip Pearlstein, but that is all, unless you want to count Andrew Wyeth's Helgas, those goose-pimply feminine-hygiene ads that are to painting more or less what The Bridges of Madison County is to the novel. It seems that with the single exception of Thomas Eakins, who died more than...
Next, determine the style that best reflects you. What's it gonna be? Hallmarkish reindeer and snow-babies? Modernist menorahs? Computer graphic snowflakes...