Word: realist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the 1985 version of which closed on Sunday. The importance of the biennial lies in the absence of other exhibitions that do the same job. It is a salon, though a very biased one (it scants realist painting, for instance, in favor of more nominally "advanced" styles), and as such it is the one regular national survey of American art held by a major U.S. museum. It pretends to be plain reportage, but it is nothing of the sort -- art-world pressures on it run too deep...
...former cult of such late 19th century artists as Bougereau or Hans Makart. But whether there is any real genius in the offing is a moot point. America has no major younger expressionist artist, like Germany's Anselm Kiefer or England's Frank Auerbach. Though it has some gifted realist painters, notably William Bailey and Neil Welliver, none can be said to compare, in point of intensity and unsparing intelligence, with England's Lucien Freud or Spain's Antonio Lopez Garcia...
...reasons. Conservatives may find it easier to support revolution in practice than in theory. This is already obvious from their choice of words. Reagan finds it hard to call the good guys rebels. Instead, he insists on calling them "freedom fighters," a heavy, inconvenient term, with an unmistakable socialist-realist ring. "Freedom fighters" practically announces itself as a term of bias. Rebels, Mr. President. With practice, it will get easier...
...were shocked at his surly treatment of an interpreter. There is also a scandal in his past: he has been dogged by stories that he borrowed priceless china from Leningrad's Hermitage museum for a daughter's wedding reception and that some pieces were broken. But he is a realist in politics. "Romanov has a controversial reputation, but he will remain a loyalist unless Gorbachev makes a major mistake," says Simes...
Beckmann aimed to be a psychological--if not a literal--realist in a bad age: the Courbet of the cannibals. His work crystallized in the face of two major subjects, the first World War (in which he served the German army as a volunteer medical orderly, until the unremitting chaos and death of trench fighting drove him into mental collapse in 1915) and the city. He was not the first artist to discover how the imminence of death can free the imagination, but he was utterly frank about it. "Since I have been under fire, I live through every shot...