Word: modernize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sensibility light-years removed from the disgusting scrimmage of raw capital that the art market has now become. He was a scholarly aesthete, and one of his firm beliefs (about which he published a book in 1937) was that the Venetian cinquecento was one of the essential sources of modern art: from its prototypes eventually came the measured sense of "luxury, calm and pleasure" that was one of the marks of the School of Paris. The Pastoral Landscape is, among other things, an homage to this idea, and its excellent catalog essays by Robert Cafritz, Lawrence Gowing and David Rosand...
...exhibition is fascinating, but a blockbuster it is not. The pictorial tradition it examines -- broadly, the image of landscape as Arcadia, from Giorgione down the centuries to Bonnard, Matisse and their later modern heirs -- contains some of the most poignant, influential and exquisitely developed paintings in the history of art. Few of them, in these days of terminally fragile objects and impossible insurance costs, could or should be allowed to travel. An exhibition that dealt with this theme at full stretch would have to include Giorgione's Tempest and his (or Titian's) Concert Champetre, Botticelli's Primavera, Titian...
...speak, its Platonic shadow. In the Renaissance-to-rococo section installed at the National Gallery, the spread and mutation of the pastoral after 1500 is shown by reflection, in prints, copies, preliminary drawings and the work of school artists. With a few exceptions, not until we get into modern times (at the Phillips) do we see the stream of pastoral imagery embodied in works that give it the fullest aesthetic definition...
...this was exactly what gave pastoral its modern quality. Modernism resisted clear narrative. It wanted to evoke mood and sensation. And in its early years at least, it was drawn to the discreet presence, strung along the shores of the Mediterranean, of an elegiac classical past. The figures in Matisse's fauve landscapes at St.-Tropez -- amply represented in this show -- are Arcadians with spots. The pale recumbent nude among the columnar tree trunks in his Nymph in the Forest, 1935-42 or '43, harks directly back to Titian. The flute player in Henri Rousseau's The Happy Quartet...
Officially the White House is authorized to have 323 permanent employees. But the Brookings Institution's Bradley Patterson thumbed through recent records and concluded that 3,366 people are assigned there in one capacity or another, most on loan from other federal departments -- a venerable fudge practiced by all modern Presidents...