Word: royalities
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...would be hard to think of a more overdue or, in some ways, a more welcome subject for an exhibition than "British Art in the 20th Century," the panorama of 310 works by some 70 artists that is now in its last month (through April 5) at the Royal Academy in London. It will then be in Stuttgart from May 8 to June 9. This is the second in a series of surveys that, under the guiding hand of the academy's exhibitions secretary Norman Rosenthal, are designed to look back on and rethink the history of modern art country...
...siecle is the natural time for summation. But it already seems clear that the Royal Academy (only 30 years ago the last bastion of peevish misunderstanding of modernism) is stealing quite a march on its competitors. The subject of modern British art has never been tried in depth by an American museum. And no matter what quibbles and demurrals one may have about the choice of this work or that name, the Royal Academy has done a wonderful job. No one with half an eye could spend a couple of hours in Burlington House and leave without asking...
...most durable form of English hostility came not from the Royal Academy, whose fogies died off, but from the enlightened purlieus of Bloomsbury, where the critic Roger Fry, who had organized the first postimpressionist show at the Grafton Galleries in 1910, and his truculent fugleman Clive Bell, inventor of the catch-phrase "significant form," made it just fine to despise new English art in the name of the French avant-garde. Given their belief in an imperial France whose seigneurs were Cezanne, Matisse and Gaugin, Fry and Bell preferred any imitation of the Ecole de Paris, however pallid, to anything...
...able to complete before his death in an infantry charge, at the age of 23, in 1915. This is the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, 1914, and hieratic it is; the face, with its wedge of a nose, embrasure-like eyes and triangular goatee, is as powerful as a royal Assyrian portrait, possessed of an awful gravity that the outrageous phallic pun of the poet's hair fails to reduce...
London' s Royal Academy puts on display a panorama of 310 works surveying the varied glories of 20th century British modernism...