Word: moderns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Although the Sydney Symphony Orchestra did not leave a lasting impression, their interpretation still should be appreciated. The audience was given the opportunity to listen to unconventional modern interpretations of orchestral music--often remaining true to the composers' intentions...
Appreciating the Weimar exhibition in this historical context is essential. In fact, The Laboratory of Modernity exhibition was actually organized to complement Eric Rentschler's Weimar Cinema class (German 155). The works themselves are usually not beautiful. Karl Hubbuch's drypoint, profile portrait of The Schaefer Sisters shows the ugly sister fastening a necklace around her prettier sister's neck. The sisters are ably sketched, but their averted gaze, their isolation on otherwise white paper, and the blunt utility of Hubbuch's composition combine to give the viewer a queer sense of detachment, which prevents wholehearted admiration while simultaneously intensifying...
...Georg Grosz each have their Hitler caricatures, but the meat of Weimar thought is elsewhere. Technology is everywhere: in the medium of photography, in Bauhaus design, in the mannequins of Josef Albers and Oskar Schlemmer, in the pipes and puppets in the portraiture section. The noisy whirligig of modern technology is both embraced in dada photo-montages of basketball-headed humanoids and controlled through the neat, organized designs of Herbert Bayer's movie house and exhibition pavilion, diagrams simultaneously full of primary color and filled with stark black lines. In responding to industrialized modern culture so precociously, Weimar visual culture...
...mannequins, the frightened dada, the busy montage, the cold Bauhaus design: All this could be funneled into some superficial critique of the continuities between Weimar culture and fascism. But such an approach would ignore peculiar versatility Weimar artists showed in reacting to and using these new modern themes...
...about, greedy and mean, but it feels like little more than a twig compared to the corpus of Grosz's works. The same is true of the representation given of Beckmann, Feiniger, Albers, Schlemmer and other Weimar stars. The only artist who has enough pieces in The Laboratory of Modernity to shine within its gray walls is L'aszl'o Moholy-Nagy, whose work finds a place in each of the exhibits three sections: "Montage," "The Modern Subject" and "Urban Visions." For a period that is already more academically interesting than anything, a more generous sampling would have been appropriate...