Word: muralists
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...soon found out. A director-daredevil in the grand British line of Michael Powell and David Lean, Boorman thinks there is still an empire, of traditions if not of global power, worth challenging and defending. Let smaller-souled men paint still lifes of kitchen sinks; Boorman is a muralist, with epic ambitions and a lust for impossible risks. He has spent his movie career navigating wild rivers (Deliverance) or cutting his way through jungles (The Emerald Forest), plunging into the mythic past (Excalibur) or the hallucinatory present (Exorcist II: The Heretic). Each film is an exploration of the dark places...
...seamless forms of Brancusi. But it took a personal and artistic crisis in 1923 to push him beyond ingenious deployments of volume and line. He took off for Mexico with his lover Tina Modotti and one of his sons. He spent the next three years rubbing shoulders with the muralist Diego Rivera, dodging the postrevolutionary turmoil and making pictures under the Mexican sun that specifies every object it falls upon. Among them were a series of vivid head shots, like his startling portrait of Manuel Hernandez Galvan, 1924, that use the subjects' plain vitality to confound the impassivity one expects...
...nature, this show can give only a faint impression of Rivera's achievements as a muralist. But his strength as a draftsman on the large scale can easily be assessed from the cartoons for the Detroit Industry frescoes. A drawing like Figure Representing the Black Race has a formal strength to match its chthonic allegorical power; it makes you realize what levels of graphic sophistication lay beneath the populist surface. Such is Rivera at his best, but even at his worst the man's kitsch and bad taste have an orotund wholeheartedness that seems endearing. His mock-surrealist landscapes...
...rightly) seen as both serious and popular, no easy feat. That a colleague of such fiercely reductive artists as Brice Marden, Barry Le Va and Richard Serra, formed in the hot arguments and unheated lofts of a pre-yuppie SoHo, would emerge by the mid-'80s as a corporate muralist, decorating the Volvo headquarters in Goteborg, Sweden, and the dining room of the AT&T Building in Manhattan with her fluent, electric and inexorably charming images of landscape and sea--could any development be less predictable...
...Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-54), is a mesmerizing story of radical art, romantic politics, bizarre loves and physical suffering that raises the question, Why hasn't someone told it all before? Part of the answer is that Kahlo was the wife of Diego Rivera, the muralist and cultural provocateur who overshadowed nearly everybody and everything he touched. He would, in fact, have dominated this book about his wife if Biographer and New York Art Critic Hayden Herrera had not put him in his place...