Word: realisms
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Throughout his rule, Stalin had sponsored a form of state art officially known as Socialist Realism. Geared to a naive, not to say brutish, mass public barely literate in artistic matters, Soviet Socialist Realism was the most coarsely idealistic kind of art ever foisted on a modern audience -- though Capitalist Realism, the never-never land of desire created by American advertising, runs it a close second...
...imagine a painter like Freud emerging in America today? It's hard to, maybe impossible. He affronts too many orthodoxies, starting with the central one: the belief that realism -- the painting of things from direct observation, warts and all -- is dead or, at best, irrelevant. You may quote the human figure from mass-media sources, by means of photography, silk-screen and so forth. Or stylize the guts out of it, so that it approaches abstraction. Or else run "expressionist" variants on it, which have nothing to say about any struggle with the real and resistant motif, since no such...
...were truly incapable of these operations--as many believe--then these setbacks are a needed dose of realism. But the U.N. was--and still may be--capable of success in both cases, which makes failure all the more damaging...
Although he won international acclaim as a novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez made his publishing debut with a book of short stories, and he has never abandoned the form. Strange Pilgrims (Knopf; 188 pages; $21), his fourth collection, proves again that the author's distinctive magic realism can come in relatively small containers. But it does so with a difference. These 12 stories take place far from the vivid South American settings of his other tales and novels, including One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1988). In a prologue the 1982 Nobel laureate notes...
Korder, one of the most promising American playwrights, reaches back in style more than a half-century to the era before the dominance of kitchen-sink realism, when the American theater was expressionistic and experimental, poetically and politically inflamed. Despite a few sentimental false notes, he is painfully apt about life in the U.S. today. But his play is set timelessly in "the modern era." Marina Draghici's set reinforces this reach for the enduring: its Art Deco windows and wire fences, beer gardens and alleys evoke the urban sense of living with the decaying legacy of the past...