Word: abstract
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...reason is the teacher shortage, another the gnat-bitten nature of the U.S. English teacher's job. Instead of teaching young minds how to put meaning into words, he must pressure-cook a stew of abstract facts for easily graded objective tests geared to handle swelling classes. The average U.S. English teacher meets 175 students daily in five classes. Should he assign one theme a week to each class, he would spend four hours a night seven nights a week, plus half the weekend, correcting papers...
...taste-degrading entertainment ("Immoral!" cried Jack Gould of the New York Times). But aside from an occasional dark hint, the television newsmen notably failed to expose the rash of fixing that had been taking place under their uplifted noses. They were thus left with the meager consolation that their abstract judgment had been correct-even though nobody seemed to be listening when they tendered...
...Prague, traveled much in youth, early demonstrated a flair for art, and made his first big money with fashion drawings for the Paris Vogue. Now settled in Manhattan, he spends a third of each year in Europe, charges $3,000 to $8,000 a portrait. He once dabbled in abstract expressionism, now pooh-poohs it: "I consider myself the avant garde, because nobody sings the song of the upper level of society today. Nobody speaks of the exceptional human being...
...neophyte in search of a style after World War II, the place to be was San Francisco. The California School of Fine Arts, which in the 1930s had brought Diego Rivera to San Francisco, had suddenly burst into life again, this time around two fiery abstract painters, Russian-born Mark Rothko, who was scrubbing canvases with shimmering bands of color, and North Dakota-born Clyfford Still, whose outsize paintings suggested both Western canyons and bark peeled from a tree. Talented younger men (notably Sam Francis and Lawrence Calcagno) spread the Rothko-Still gospel in staccato dab-and-dash across...
Split Coming. Almost as suddenly as it arose, the San Francisco Renaissance split. Still and Rothko departed for the East Coast. Dean of those who remained was Boston-born David Park, and in 1951 he abruptly turned his back on abstract expressionism and won an award in the San Francisco Annual for a painting, Boys on Bicycles, in which the boys were boys, and the wheels were round. "As you grow older," Park said, "it dawns on you that you are yourself-that your job is not to force yourself into a style, but to do what you want...