Word: showing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Royal Academy show includes quite a lot of De Chirico's more debatable pseudoclassical work from the '20s -- this is now de rigueur, thanks to its popularity among postmodernists, who see it as a daring and prophetic form of backwardness -- as well as the paintings of his hardly less talented brother, the painter-composer-dram atist who worked under the name of Alberto Savinio and turned the late scheme of metaphysical painting into an even wilder pastiche than it had already become...
...whole, the rooms devoted to 1910-35 are the best. The show does a particular service by exhuming the impressive work of Mario Sironi (1885-1961) and, at long last, intelligently describing the relations between Italian modernists and Fascism in the 1920s and '30s. The pieties of art politics, up to the present, have tended to discourage this, since the arrival of Mussolini was greeted with rapture by so many leading artists and intellectuals. The Fascist rhetoric of dynamism and machine efficiency meshed with (and was partly inspired by) that of futurism; while the Duce's promise of a renewed...
...show contains a few further surprises, such as the gritty and beautifully painted domestic dramas of Fausto Pirandello (1889-1975) and the best of all younger Duchampians, Piero Manzoni (1933-63), whose balloon full of artist's breath and cans full of artist's feces are wonderfully prophetic satires on a market mania whose present inflation he could scarcely have imagined...
...show has a dying fall into the rhetoric of the '80s, represented here for the umpteenth time by Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente and Mimmo Paladino. These figures have become quasi-official artists, like the stars of the Paris salons a century ago. Yet when the '80s have receded, it will seem odd that the feeble draftsmanship in Clemente's washed-out frescoes should once have been applauded, or that the lurid bombast of even the better works of Cucchi, such as the droopy head that lies like a huge Dalinian watch along the cemetery roof in Stupid Picture...
...variation on this con, excited consumers who call to claim prizes after receiving you-are-a-winner letters are asked for their credit-card numbers and card-expiration dates "as verification." The new car or microwave oven never arrives. But before long, mysterious charges begin to show up on the cards. Joel Lisker, MasterCard's vice president for security and fraud control, & estimates that thieves using such methods skimmed at least $105 million from the $120 billion in U.S. credit-card transactions last year...