Word: realist
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...example: a sentence in The Painted Word mentioning that Franz Kline once painted such social-realist subjects as "unemployed Negroes, crippled war veterans and the ubiquitous workers with open blue workshirts and necks wider than their heads." Hughes says, "In fact, he never painted such pictures. Either Wolfe is making them up or he cannot distinguish between Franz Kline and Ben Shahn...
Robert Hughes comments: "Kline was a figurative painter to the end of the 1940s. The point, however, is that Wolfe presented Kline 'in the '30s' as a party hack, 'dutifully cranking out' paintings of social-realist cliches at the dictation of unnamed 'drillmasters.' No such body of work by Kline exists. To support his thesis, all Wolfe can produce is one picture from the 40s-and even it is too expressionist to fit the strict canon of social realism...
...disturbing implications of last week's election, Italy is not on the verge of turning Communist, although, through their heavy control of labor unions, the Communists have the capacity to bring all Italy to a halt (as they have demonstrated through innumerable strikes). Berlinguer is too much the realist to push for real power now. He aims first of all for a "consultative" share in policymaking at the parliamentary level, rather than a partnership in a formal coalition...
...verify a fact, check a source or even do a day's consistent reading in a library. To nail the dozens of elementary howlers in his text would require almost as many pages as The Painted Word takes. One example will do for all. Wolfe on social-realist art in the '30s: "Even Franz "Kline, the abstract painter's abstract painter, was dutifully cranking out paintings of unemployed Negroes, crippled war veterans and the ubiquitous workers with open blue workshirts and necks wider than their heads." In fact, he never painted such pictures. Either Wolfe is making...
...other sort is best represented by Alexej Pludek's antisemitic "novel" Vabank, the first to deal in literature with the events of 1968. As in any socialist-realist work the characters must be archetypes. The "positive hero" is a working class Czech guy, who just returned from Syria where he was providing "brotherly help" on an engineering project. The "bad guy" is a son of the exploiting class, "pretentious, selfish and foreign to our country." The fact that he operates as "eminence grise" of various literary and political circles is not "an indication of exceptional gifts, but rather a symptom...