Word: modernizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Next week the imposing galleries and auditoriums of New York City's Museum of Modern Art will be turned into a barnyard. A stuttering pig, a frazzled black duck, a wily coyote, an amorous skunk, a pussycat with a paunch, a tiny yellow bird and, to be sure, the world's most "wascally wabbit" will invade MOMA for a four-month tribute to the Warner Bros. cartoon shop, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. But that's not all, folks. Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote, Pepe Le Pew, Sylvester J. Pussycat, Tweety Pie, Bugs Bunny...
...Europe, however, Schwitters was virtually the last great modern artist to be widely misunderstood and rejected. Uprooted from his native Germany by Nazism, he found himself cast adrift at 49, a hard age at which to begin life in exile. He went to Norway, and then in the early '40s passed through a series of British internment camps. The artworks and documents he left behind in Hanover were destroyed in an air raid. He suffered from epilepsy and strokes. His wife died of cancer. To support himself he had to do tourist views and kitsch portraits in the Lake District...
...retrospective that New York City's Museum of Modern Art has dedicated to his work this summer (through Oct. 1) cannot by nature give much idea of Schwitters' larger ambitions. The projects that vented them either were not begun or were destroyed, like the house in Hanover that he transformed into an immense continuous construction, the Merzbau. The show's catalog, written by its curator, John Elderfield of MOMA, far surpasses in lucidity and thoroughness anything else on Schwitters and becomes the authoritative work on the artist. It evokes in brilliant detail the aggressive and sadistic side of Schwitters' lost...
...many years ago, downtown St. Louis was, like most old American downtowns, a void, dreary and disheartening, a place where respectable people worked, bums lived and almost nobody strolled. Given that lifelessness, the city's attempt to create a heroic modern monument to itself in 1965, Eero Saarinen's arch beside the Mississippi, came to seem like self-mockery: a pure, gorgeous steel span rising from a dying downtown and a forgotten riverfront, a giant logo erected as a wishful substitute for authentic urban reconstruction...
...barrel-vaulted Grand Hall, however, the strict preservationists were indulged. The gilt is real gold leaf. Artisans worked 3,000 hours fixing up the large pictorial stained-glass window. The marble for the floors is from the same French quarry used by the station's builders. Indeed, to the modern eye, accustomed to cleaner colors and lines, the period hues and ornamental density of this main interior space may seem too authentic: the muddy green and stained-glass glow and riot of gold are, all together, extremely rich. The room's Gilded Age swank is gorgeous, not inspiring...