Word: symbolist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...idea that landscape photography should be intentionally expressive did not really surface until the frontier was gone, by the turn of the century. Its bearers were among the pioneers of photographic modernism-Edward Steichen, Clarence White and Alvin Langdon Coburn, with their "symbolist," tremulous images of tree and field. In these artful and decorous prints, as Szarkowski remarks, "Nature has become ... a part of the known habit and syntax of art, like fruit or flowers arranged on the sideboard." After them, the problem was to recomplicate the game of seeing; to show how the camera could deal with what...
There were other influences too: Daumier for the dense, impacted drawing, a touch of caricaturists like Théophile Steinlen for the faces, and symbolist poetry for the emblematic moodiness of some of the scenes. Some of the most powerful aspects of Hopper's work came from outside the history of painting itself: from theater, whose devices of staging and lighting Hopper constantly invoked. Hopper's rooms and landscapes have a constant air of expectancy. When empty, they seem to have been just vacated by actors; when they are peopled, the figures are posed and lit as though...
...make the situation worse, Munter's style can't be pinned down to one movement. She shows little traditional influence in most of her work, and in others, a definite Symbolist tendency, like her Portrait of Kandinsky, 1906, a lineoleum print that portrays Kandinsky staring out penetratingly against a background of large patches of stained-glass color. Her later Blaue Reiter work shows the influence of artists Jawlensky and Macke, as well as Kandinsky. In Still Life with Sunflowers, a simple outline of a vase supports very simply painted flowers. Using a minimum of strokes, Munter has made the stems...
...just another job; it is a moral obligation involving jeopardies and commitments that cannot safely be jobbed out, in effect, on a mercenary basis. There seems something dishonorable and even vaguely decadent in privileged Americans hiring others to do their duty for them. "As for "living," the French symbolist Villiers de l'Isle-Adam once said with languid wit, "our servants will do that for us." As for tending the radarscopes and rolling around in the mud and giving the Soviet Union pause and enforcing our foreign-policy-by-other-means, if necessary, too many Americans say we will...
...leads nowhere. Isaac, the fatherless heir, who analyzes his past by plodding through his grandfather's ledgers and talking it out--shrink/client style--with his uncle, recollects his past and so avoids repeating its mistakes. He renounces his slave and plantation holdings and becomes, with Faulkner's sledgehammer Christian symbolist touches, a carpenter. But Isaac is childless and lacks collective vision anyway, as King observes, "to become the founder himself and to pass on this moral (or aesthetic) vision to anyone else...