Word: painterly
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DIED. Philip Guston, 66, influential U.S. painter; of a heart attack; in Woodstock, N. Y. The Canadian-born son of Russian immigrants, Guston joined Jackson Pollock, a schoolmate of his in Los Angeles, and other contemporaries like Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko in forging the abstract expressionist movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the past decade he returned from his often dreamlike works to representational painting. His explanation: "I got sick and tired of all the purity. I wanted to tell stories...
...popular soccer game or concert in return for a good cut of meat; tipping off the plumber about a shipment of shoes that is due to arrive in a shop as payment for fixing a leaking pipe; or holding down a second job as a furniture mover or apartment painter. Na levo can and does, however, also extend to smuggling consumer goods in from the West, running a hidden factory, stealing state-owned materials and skipping out from work on a state job to moonlight privately...
According to the dogma of Socialist Realism, all art and literature must conform to the triple standard of partinost (party character), ideinost (socialist content) and narodnost (closeness to the people). For Stalin, this ideal was most faithfully reflected in the work of his favorite painter, Alexander Gerasimov, whose portraits of the dictator in various noble poses hung in museums, offices, factories and homes everywhere. At the same time, in the '30s and '40s, Stalin used every kind of coercion to apply the Socialist Realism doctrine, destroying the avant-garde and the contacts with Western artists that it needed...
Today the most powerful state weapon against the dissident painter who cannot or will not join the Union of Soviet Artists-a closed Socialist Realist shop-is the law on tuneyadstvo (parasitism). An unemployed artist (and all nonunion members are, by definition, unemployed) can be punished with one to two years of prison. Apart from this, the "unofficial" artist must deal with a hundred resistances unknown to his Western counterpart...
Where can a sculptor find bronze, steel or plaster without union approval? How can a painter get access to studio space, even paints and canvas? How and where can the work be exhibited? How can anyone hear about it except by word of mouth, since all art writing in magazines like Iskusstvo (Art) or Sovietskaya Kultura is a direct emanation of union views, themselves determined by the Ministry of Culture...