Word: symbolist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Part of the secret of his success is that his eclecticism creates surface expectations of major art (complexity, depth, psychic intensity and so on) without discharging them in explicit meanings. He wittily exploits the affinity between artist and charlatan. A symbolist with roller skates, he moves very quickly across a vast terrain of appropriated motifs, and the results are usually banal. Even in today's morass of worthless "personal" imagery, it would be hard to find a sillier painting than one in the Castelli show of a green whirlpool a la Poe with a man and his separated genitals disappearing...
...fiction inside. But if his background is unclear, Erofeev's literary heritage is not: his prose is in the great Russian grotesque tradition, hearkening back to Gogol by way of such earlier Soviet satirists as Bulgakov, Zamyatin, and Zoshchenko. There are also traces of authors as diverse as the Symbolist Andrei Bely (in some of the bizarre urban imagery). Rabelais, and J.D. Salinger (whose Catcher in the Rye was widely circulated in the Soviet Union...
...romantic vision may be the reason he finds such joy in other people. Haunting images recur throughout Presence of a man alone in a room with a landscape of thoughts, savoring the past actions of other people. In "House-Moving from Tournon to Bescancon," a nod to the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme*. Williamson writes...
Williams was also a moral symbolist. His earthy characters journey over a landscape that pulses with the strife-torn dualities of human nature. The duel is between God and the Devil, love and death, the flesh and the spirit, innocence and corruption, light and darkness, the eternal Cain and the eternal Abel. In the American tradition, this links Williams to three 19th century moral symbolists: Hawthorne, Poe and Melville...
...history. An Italian, born in 1888 and raised partly in Greece-where his father, an engineer, planned and built railroads-he led a long, productive life, almost Picassian in length; he died in 1978. He had studied in Munich, and in his early 20s, under the spell of a symbolist painter named Arnold Böcklin, he began to produce a series of strange, oneiric cityscapes. When they were seen in Paris after 1911, they were ecstatically hailed by painters and poets from Picasso to Paul Eluard; before long De Chirico became one of the heroes of surrealism...