Word: underknown
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...show of this and 19 other Beckmann paintings at the downtown branch of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City is--no other word for it--a revelation. Beckmann, who died in 1950, was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, but he remains comparatively underknown in Manhattan. Thirty-one years have passed since a New York museum devoted a show to his work. Why this should be, one can only guess. Presumably it has something to do with the belief that purely abstract painting was the climax of modernism, so that a painter whose entire sensibility...
...city was seen as the mill of oppression, grinding women down into whoredom and men into anonymity. German artists like George Grosz, Karl Hubbuch and the remarkable and still underknown Hannah Hoch imagined it as a grotesque theater, full of libido and irony -- the stage of a morality play, updated to reflect the postwar sense of despair. From Grosz in Berlin to Frans Masereel in Antwerp, an enormous iconography of city life -- its edginess, speed, compression, perversion, fixation on style -- developed in the '20s. The idea that the city is constructed of signs, of media and information overload as much...
...Nevertheless, he has virtually been dropped from the history of the New York School. At most, Pousette-Dart has had a sentence or two (and not always that) in the standard history books; none of the influential critics of the '50s backed him, and he remains a decidedly underknown painter...