And the small, sometimes postcard-size creations, with their childlike drawing, mysterious symbols and ethereal fantasies often puzzled viewers, even those familiar with the modernist vocabulary.

Rather than creating an image of a woman with applied elements of an African style, Lam has created a totemic Santeria divinity through the medium of a modernist vocabulary.

The real achievement is that the architects have found a way within the modernist vocabulary to give their building the thing most modern buildings most urgently lack: texture.

It's as if the architects wanted so much to prove that they could use the modernist vocabulary to play post-modern visual games that they went overboard, and the result is superficial and glib.

Recently, the house was sold to its second owners, who hired Betsy McCue Train, a Virginia-based designer, to restore the house and design an addition sympathetic to the modernist vocabulary.

Every time Mr. Picker summons his modernist vocabulary, closer to the idiom of his days as a young serialist, the music becomes more involving.

His generic, stereotypical renditions of this essentially modernist vocabulary are at once amusing and deflating; they are - like the photographs underneath them - inadequate reproductions of the real thing.

Or that Manuel Alvarez Bravo, living outside a center of photographic activity, was one of the inventors of photography's modernist vocabulary in the 1920's.

Outdoor sculpture and mosaics become the signature, marked by the "influence of the modernist vocabulary," Ms. Cohen said.

After working with modern architect Walter Gropius at the Architects' Collaborative, Gund began his career with significant projects that drew from a modernist vocabulary.