Word: modernists
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...West, artists succeed or fail in the marketplace. There is no official line on art, in any useful sense of the term. But in the U.S.S.R., art must toe the ideological line. If dissident -which generally means "modernist" -artists are not persecuted as systematically as dissident writers, and fewer of them actually end up laying rails in Siberia or being shot full of drugs in KGB madhouses, this merely reflects the fact that art is not as forceful a channel for maverick ideas as literature. Nevertheless, state approval governs every aspect of the production, exhibition, sale and discussion of painting...
...experiments of modern art was carried out. The leaders of the avantgarde, among them Kasimir Malevich, Naum Gabo, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, wanted to serve the new power of the left by combining revolutionary art with revolutionary politics. Russian constructivism was, in fact, the only heroic modernist style that drew its strength from the revolutionary impetus. Yet its sin was in being abstract, and for that it was consigned to darkness by Stalin and his cultural apparatchiks after...
...Stalin used every kind of coercion to apply the Socialist Realism doctrine, destroying the avant-garde and the contacts with Western artists that it needed. By 1953, when Stalin died, no Soviet artist could see, except in the most fragmentary way, any modernist art at all; the work of the constructivists, that heritage of Russian intellect and radical enthusiasm, was invisible...
Today one is not apt to think of allegory as a "modern" form, since it contradicts the abstraction of modernist painting. But it mattered a great deal to Picasso, and he resorted to it at some of his intense moments?not only the death of Casagemas, but in the construction of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (which began as an allegory of venereal disease, a subject of great interest to the energetic Pablo), of Guernica, and on into his "Mediterranean" subjects of the 1930s, with their bulls and horses, virgins and Minotaurs, caves, ruins and nymphs. Allegory was the conscious, intelligible...
...Pollini's personal life remains private, fenced off behind the rows of neutral facts in program notes. He was the only child of a prominent modernist architect in Milan. He began playing the piano at five and immediately felt "a special connection" with the instrument. At eleven, he gave his first public performance. Today, in between the 60 or so concerts he plays a year, he lives in Milan with his wife and baby...