Word: modernists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this in his stride, and his oeuvre (closed, alas, too early) handily answers his detractors. Nobody who cares about painting as an art--as distinct from propaganda, complaint or "cutting edge" ephemera--could be indifferent to Diebenkorn's work or to the long, intense and fascinating dialogue with the modernist past it embodies...
...able regularly to visit Washington museums, especially the Phillips Collection. One painting there, in particular, got to him: Matisse's Studio, Quai St. Michel, 1916. Though Diebenkorn would continue to meditate on other works by Matisse (and Mondrian, and Cezanne, and Bonnard, and so on through a wide classical-modernist pantheon) for the rest of his working life, this particular Matisse, with its simultaneous inside-outside view, thrilled and inspired him: "I noticed its spatial amplitude; one saw a marvelous hollow or room yet the surface is right there...right up front...
...Getty is not "a building." There are moments, both off site and on, when its collection of six separate units on a ridge linked by plazas and terraces resembles a very honed and buffed Modernist version of an Italian hill town. Architect Meier himself has grown wary of the hill-town analogy. "Think of it," he says, "as a small college campus with different departments, some more visible than others--not a museum but an institution in which art predominates...
...Getty envisioned by Williams and the trust had to be, in every conceivable way, a class act. After the original list of 33 architects had been whittled down to three finalists, the committee in 1984 settled on the New York City-based Meier, America's chief exponent of "late Modernist" classicism. He was the one who, it was believed, could deliver an impeccable and thoughtful level of planning and detailing. One of the factors in Meier's favor was that even then he was an experienced museum designer (the Frankfort Museum for Decorative Arts, 1979-85; the High Museum...
...word reduced written in huge block letters on the wall of its main gallery; another gallery devoted to a single drawing by Sol Lewitt; some huge and utterly banal sculpture by Jim Dine; and so on. And, of course, that one-shot icon of the conformity of late-Modernist official taste, Jeff Koons' Puppy, 1992, sitting outside the museum...