Word: mural
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...inevitable and agonizingly slow lurch towards a mawkish, yet depressing conclusion. Anderson's plays are strongly reminiscent of another expression of his times-Socialist Realism art. Like that famed WPA stuff, Winterset incorporates bold, tradition-smashing design with a sense of social justice; and like a Socialist Realism mural in a post office, it looks heavy and over-muscled-an awkward reminder of the not-so-distant past...
Most of the others are skillfully rendered copies in realistic settings. Captured on film by Frenchman Jean Vertut, who specializes in photographing cave art, a Lascaux mural of horses, bulls and stags covers an entire wall of the show. Designer Henry Gardiner's theatrical lighting suggests the flickering oil lamps by which the cave artists must have worked. The exhibit also includes elegant silk-screen reproductions crafted by Douglas Mazonowicz, an artist and writer who has studied rock art around the world. Perhaps most impressive of all are the full-size replicas of Cro-Magnon man's sculptures...
...subject matter of the paintings is usually fairly unimportant. Sometimes, however, the titles of the works give away Davis's intent and lead the viewer to play a guessing game to figure out how the abstractions represent what the title suggests. For instance, the mural Davis did for a studio in the Municipal Broadcasting Company looks at first like nothing more than a busy arrangement of abstract designs and bright colors. But, with a little imagination the viewer can make out forms that suggest radio towers, musical instruments and sound waves, and pretty soon, the whole painting begins to pulse...
This capacity for empathy with his subject and--more of a challenge--the artist's skill at bringing his audience to a like understanding has its roots in the animism of the earliest primitive artists: French cave-mural painters, mask-fashioners of Africa and Eskimo sculptors. The belief that a spirit exists in every living thing implies that in order to fashion an image one must first understand exactly what sort of spirit moves the subject. By the same token, art initially served a practical function: it was believed that by symbolically capturing prey (one captured a portion...
Surely the gray-and-white-faced miner depicted on the barn mural in "Rural Murals in Dairyland" [May 16] is not an iron miner but a lead miner, -a representative of the men who settled our area of southwestern Wisconsin in the early 1800s. They holed up in their mines in the winters to become known as Badgers and provided much of the lead used by the North in the Civil War. It is truly fitting that his portrait is the center figure of the mural, for he was in the center of the development of the state...