Word: pastel
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...lively, articulate woman who was born in Athens, Ohio, Lin graduated only last May from Yale, where she majored in architecture (and beat out one of her mentors in the Viet Nam competition). It was her concept, rather than her hazy pastel rendering of it, that won over the eight-man jury (four architects, three sculptors and one critic...
...they can be, but not very often. A peculiar case in point is After Rodin, one of the recent pastel drawings of a nude woman sprawled on her back, rosy, firm and decapitated. To what does this repugnant, though not very gory, piece of sadism owe its title? On the face of it, to Rodin's fondness for making fragmentary figures, headless torsos, isolated arms or legs. But then one is reminded that this, in Rodin's own day, was ceaselessly guyed by satirists as literal mutilation; so much so that during the Turkish atrocities in Armenia...
Such utterances are less interesting than the oeuvre they garnish. Kitaj's recent drawings, particularly his pastels, are of marvelous density. The firm boundary line, probing and circumscribing, pays its respects to Degas, as does the broken, emphatic texture of the pastel, sometimes built up to a thick coat of peacock-hued dust. There is nothing theoretical about these drawings, no "as if-such as one might expect from an artist turning, at midcareer, away from modernist fragmentation. Solid, chunky, driven, greedy: these adjectives apply to Kitaj's appropriation of the world-particularly the bodies of women-with...
Fassbinder means to contrast death on the Russian front and in the refugee camps (shot in the harsh, primary colors of the Fauves) with life on cloud nine of the Nazi fantasy (shown in the pastel soft-focus of the later Doris Day films). Indeed, one can find hints of the director's auto biography: a contrast between his pinchpenny past and his recent, glossier work. He appears here in the role of a "secret Resistance fighter"-against the Nazis on-screen and the moneymen of the new German cinema. But he puts up too little resistance...
...real feature of current art, there are still affinities among artists. What are the main ones here? To begin with, realist painting-but with a twist. The plain declarative style of tonal realism, whose American master is Philip Pearlstein, is hardly in evidence, although there are some exquisitely rendered pastel studies of gray, tumblng Midwestern skies by William Beckman at the Hirshhorn, and the Whitney has some beautifully observed images by William Bailey (still life) and Rackstraw Downes (panoramic landscape). The best figurative work at the Guggenheim is by the oldest of the "emergent" artists, the 63-year-old West...