Word: visual
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PAINTINGS ON VIEW IN the exhibitionare unfamiliar even to Americans at home in theworld of canvas and pigment. While the writers andmusicians of the period--Tolstoy, Dostoevsky,Chekhov, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky--have achievedworldwide fame, the visual artists remain largelyunknown outside of the Soviet Union. In the latenineteenth century Russian culture came into itsown, breaking free of the slavish imitation ofwestern norms that had plagued it since Peter theGreat first journeyed across the steppes in the1700s. The efforts of painters to forge a uniqueRussian artistic identity rivaled their literaryand musical counterparts in complexity, sincerityand originality...
...years prior to those addressed in theexhibition, the Russian art world was dominated bythe Petersburg Academy of Arts, founded in 1757.The Academy set the standard of aestheticprinciples in the visual arts, and following theEuropean orthodoxy of the time, consideredidealized depictions of mythological subjects inthe neoclassical style the only acceptablerepresentation of genuine beauty. As a result,artists interested in peasant life, the landscape,or scenes from contemporary history were oftenexcluded from major exhibitions...
Studded with maps and cultural reminders of the Middle East, the spring-term headquarters of UPI's recently-returned Middle East bureau chief bombards the visitor with visual images of a long and varied career...
Usually there was nothing to see, except for a mass of highly trained adults, covering one of their profession's most coveted assignments, shifting their weight and waiting for the President like courtiers. All this for a simple TV visual or possibly and answer to a single question...
...individuals like Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein and Paul Nash, and so on through to the post-'60s paintings of men like Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj and Howard Hodgkin -- now strike us as not just a footnote to, but an essential part of, the visual culture of the past 80 years: neither "provincial" nor "minor," but singular and grand? What muffled the recognition of British art? Partly, it must be admitted, the English themselves. No nation in this century has been harder on its own artists...