Word: pompeian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...museums become more dependent on corporate funding, this drift away from serious, intelligent exhibition toward spectacle will increase. There will be much more wrapping for mass appeal, in the form of Tut-style blockbusters and Pompeian frolics. Meanwhile, the proper functions of the museum will receive proportionately less support, because they are not "sexy." As corporate public relations firms insert their flackery into the curatorial arena, diminishing the museum's own control of what it shows while encouraging clients to favor exhibitions with guaranteed pull, the situation will not improve. Eventually, we may be reduced to the Ultimate...
...Tate Gallery. Mellon has thus in a few years given away buildings and works of art worth rather more than $200 million. Even granted the parlous state of the dollar, no other living American has committed himself to art patronage on this scale. (Paul Getty endowed his mock-Pompeian Getty Museum above Malibu, Calif., to the tune of a staggering $700 million, but Getty died in 1976, and very little of the money has been spent...
...wrench of imagination that provoked Cubism and provides an arbitrary point of departure for all that is most convulsive in Picasso's art and modernism generally: Les Demoiselles d'A vignon. His eclecticism -another of the virtuoso's traits-produced incessant raids on other styles, from Pompeian murals, 17th century Dutch etchings and Ingres drawings to Dogon masks and Mogul miniatures. Few great artists since Rembrandt had amassed, and used, such a hybrid pile of objects from art or nature as Picasso; variety was his sauna. He had a mysterious capacity, now documented through an almost limitless...
...imagination of a group of European sculptors after World War II. All at once, Bond Street and Rue de Seine overflowed with tasteful mock fossils by Marino Marini, Germaine Richier and César. The style spread to America. The parallels were too many and too pat to miss: Pompeianism suited many a Fifties liberal, with his passive sense of impending catastrophe and his culturally induced impotence in the face of Joe McCarthy and Curtis LeMay. (Q. What did you do in the Great War, Daddy? A. I sat down in an orderly manner, baby, ate some larks' tongues...