Word: surrealistes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DIED. Giorgio de Chirico, 90, Italian painter, whose early surrealist works helped define 20th century art; of a heart attack; in Rome...
Between 1912 and 1920, De Chirico produced a series of images?his pittura metafisica, or metaphysical painting?that altered the history of modernism. His empty colonnades and squares, populated by statues and shadows, exerted a vast influence on the growth of a specifically surrealist art. Max Ernst, René Magritte and Salvador Dali all paid homage to the liberating power of early De Chirico. He seemed to have made the actions of the dreaming mind more accessible, vivid and poignant than any other painter. "If a work of art is to be truly immortal," he explained, "it must pass quite beyond...
Although no finished Gorky paintings are in the show, his drawings and preliminary studies for other compositions are examples of the mature Gorky--the abstract expressionist whom Gorky eventually discovered in himself with the help of the Chileam surrealist Matta, after years of imitating the work of his contemporaries and past masters. The study for "Calendars", recently donated to the Fogg, is a very strong work which shows Gorky in one of his finer moments...
...very strict dichotomy, as Szarkowski himself stresses. The typical photo in this show, mirror or window, is cool, low in narrative content, linguistically sophisticated, beautifully made and, by the conventions of photojournalism, not very arresting. Its pleasures have to do with formal wit, mild irony and surrealist incongruity. One sees a thing nailed down with a decisive tap, as when Lee Friedlander, a deceptively casual imagemaker, positions his eyeline on an ordinary suburban street to get a flowering shrub directly behind a lamppost, so that the street light seems to be emitting great sprays of blossom in broad daylight...
...Francisco through the spring of 1979, attests to that. For a small but steadfast audience, Westermann's imagination has for years been one of the most original and disturbing in American art. During the '60s, he was widely condescended to as a minor figure, a Yankee post-surrealist constructing his dark whimsies-the haunted houses and shark-besieged boats in glass cases -at a distance from the "mainstream." But now that irony, memory, autobiography, humor and outright obsession have asserted their claims in art once more, Westermann's importance cannot be shrugged...