Word: populistic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Campaigns against pornography are not being orchestrated solely by conservative Republicans from the heartland. Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn, a populist Democrat in the cradle of liberty, has been trying to clean up the city's "combat zone," which was officially designated an adult-entertainment area...
...made for ending the story in 1918. It is too bad, however, that the MOMA show, unlike its Vienna and Paris predecessors, omits all but a bit of political context. There is scant reference, for example, to the troubling de facto alliance between the Secessionist aesthetes and Vienna's populist right against late 19th century liberalism, or to the right-wing regime that ran the city during the % Werkstatte's glory days, or to the unpleasant fact that the bank Wagner designed was established as an alternative to the "Jewish banks." By remaining ahistorical, MOMA has abetted a kind...
...testing the lower limits. Reagan's opinions and policies would be enough in another time to have protesters marching in the streets, or worse. And yet something about Reagan soothes and unites--even though the effects of his programs may repel. He softens the meaner edges of conservatism with populist effusions, reaching outside the rigid framework of ideologies to the pool of shared American experience, to our dreamy nostalgias. Two landslides and six years on, the Gallup poll gives Reagan a 68% approval rating, the best he has done since May 1981, after he was shot and responded gallantly...
...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 of the 1940s, together with some of his more contrived social portraits, are rubbish, but they do not spoil the cumulative effect...
Perhaps it is time to amend the familiar high-modernist view of Rivera as a gifted painter deformed by the needs of propaganda. Sometimes his work was too openly didactic and coarse grained, too attached to populist stereotypes of love, comradeship, struggle and work. It offended the etiquette of alienation. Too bad--he was still an extraordinary painter, a lighthouse of vitality. Nobody could say Rivera kept a steady political line, but at least he was no ideologue; his socialism was instinctive and antitotalitarian, like Picasso's, but much deeper. Rivera gave Leon Trotsky asylum from Stalinist assassins (including...