Word: modernists
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...like to make something that is real in itself, that does not remind anyone of any other thing, and that does not have to be explained-like the letter A for instance." Thus one of America's first abstract painters, Arthur Dove, set up his version of the modernist hope. To visit the traveling retrospective show of 70 Dove paintings and collages that Art Historian Barbara Haskell organized for the San Francisco Museum of Art (it opens this week at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo) is to sense how difficult that ambition must have been...
...least in Paris, one had an accessible field of new art. However poor, however rejected or unsuccessful he might be, the Parisian artist could afford to feel that he was part of a continuum known as the avantgarde. In America this was not so; the way to a modernist aesthetic lay through nearly impassable thickets of provincialism, with a very meager supply of information as a guide...
...Reformed Modernist. Part of his persona was his view of modern art. He regarded it with the contempt that an old blues pianist, after 30 years' rattling the ivories in a Kansas whorehouse, might reserve for ten minutes of John Cage silence. No guts, no drawing, no life: nothing but wind and delusion. Benton made no bones about his idea that nearly everything in art since the Fauves had been rubbish at best, and at worst the fruit (so to speak) of a homosexual conspiracy to rob the U.S. of its primal manly culture. The American museum, he grumbled...
...THEME, in a word, is alienation. And because alienation has been cooked to a charred kernel, at least since Eliot's "unreal city" in The Wasteland, all that is left to do is pick it apart into ashes and let them scatter about in modernist prose, hoping that something new and different will happen. In Box Man every conceivable "new" technique is used--from describing the color of ink used in the marginalia, printed verbatim, to a fight between the box man and his fictitious alter-ego about who is the real narrator of the story...
...leads him to inaccuracy and self-contradiction. Having accused the serialists of mechanically turning out music that is "form without content," he now condemns them for discarding the order imposed by diatonicism. Stravinsky's "great save," neoclassicism, is "the concept that could finally impose some aesthetic order on this modernist chaos...