Word: modernists
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...wants his readers to clear their senses of the cant and iconography that fog perceptions. His highest value is individualism as evolved by Western civilization. He skips through history to find something rotten in Byzantium, the "delirium and horror of the East." There is also the calamity of modernist architecture: "Ubiquitous concrete, with the texture of turd and the color of an upturned grave." The flip side of this disgust is nostalgia. Though Brodsky overwhelms with startling insight and provocations, he is most affecting in "In a Room and a Half," an account of living with his parents in their...
...little mountain" -- which it is, in a way, compared with the landscapes that surround her Ghost Ranch -- and wondered why so many words had been piled on it. Before her 30th birthday, in small watercolors of epic space like Light Coming on the Plains, 1917, she had become seraphically modernist without imitating cubism, fauvism or any other transatlantic recipes...
Alejandro is an illusive character because his friends and enemies tell contradictory stories about him, but more important because the narrator repeatedly reminds the reader that his investigations are a preparation for lying, for conjuring a fiction. Such modernist hugger-mugger has great potential for tedium. But Vargas Llosa's lucid intellect and technical gifts allow him to toy with uncertainty and shuffle time with deceptive ease. A good deal of Peru's mournful history and wretched present are economically conveyed. Leaving the Museum of the Inquisition, the narrator is confronted by a score of beggars. "They constitute a sort...
...maiden name. (Less is more be damned: in German, mies means lousy, more or less.) Mies van der Rohe, invigorated by Weimar Berlin, spent most of the 1920s designing gorgeous industrial exhibits and handsome, blocky villas descended from Frank Lloyd Wright. Well into the decade, however, Mies the modernist was not scrupulously practicing what he preached: a neo-Georgian country house appeared as late...
...year later in Berlin, Mies met Architect Philip Johnson, then 24. And it was Johnson to whom Mies owed much of his latter-day American fame and fortune. Johnson organized an exhibit of modernist work at MOMA in 1932, co- authored a book on the movement and mounted a 1947 MOMA show all about Mies. Then, in the mid-1950s, Johnson helped him win the commission for the Seagram headquarters in New York City and collaborated on the design...