Word: abstract
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lama rulers. He leaves politics to others. A shy, untraveled man with a pinched face and faint mustache, a delicate porcelain figurine who goes about in green-tinted glasses, Tibetan cap and a golden bakkhu (robe), the Maharajah paints Sikkim's misty peaks and glaciers in a surprisingly abstract style. Recently he had a "vision" of the Abominable Snowman, put him on canvas as a skinny, jet-black creature with a red face, carrying a naked pink lady across the peaks of the Himalayas. When he is not painting, he is praying. "His Majesty," an aide reports, "gets...
...antimatter as oddly charged particles that disappear on contact with matter has some connection, Dali thinks, with the medievalists' view of angels, which could light in hosts upon the point of a pin. His new canvas relates to both concepts. Seen close, it does dissolve into pure abstraction-as abstract, say, as the goings-on in a physicist's cloud chamber...
Present fashion has partly reverted to the archaic, preferring the Kore to the Nike. To devotees of abstract art, the Kore seems the less fussy and closer to the "pure form" of modern sculptors such as Brancusi and Henry Moore. Yet the Kore's abstract balance is physical and intensely feminine too. She bulges the stone, breathing, and smiles from her cliff of self most tenderly. The Nike (Victory) has greatness of another order: she moves like a swirl of gauze and a body both, proudly displaying the lightness of spirit-filled flesh. She is the archaic maid...
...unknowing before the Renaissance image. A piece of paper floating on edge and a cherry hung on a string, painted to fool the eye, emphasize the strangeness of the rest. Dali's title for this weird and serious effort: Quasi-grey picture which, closely seen, is an abstract one; seen from two metres is the Sistine Madonna of Raphael; and from fifteen metres is the ear of an angel measuring one metre and a half; which is painted with antimatter; therefore with pure energy...
...Psychotherapy at Barcelona in September was centered on existential analysis. At this meeting Dr. May explained why its influence in the U.S. has so far been negligible. A pragmatic tradition tracing back to frontier days, he contended, has made Americans a nation of doers, suspicious of theorizing or abstract speculation. But just beneath the conscious surface. Dr. May saw in the American character a rich subsoil of concern for "knowing by doing." This brought him around to Kierkegaard, who proclaimed: "Truth exists for the individual only as he himself produces it in action...