Word: abstract
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sort of peeping-tom attitude, that seems to offer delight in a sort of pseudo-wickedness, yet is extremely embarrassed by acknowledgement of the physical facts. Clark refreshingly does not share this attitude nor disparage the sensual aspects of the art of the nude. "No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling...
...necessity and depth of this "pure form" in the art of the nude is clearly underlined. Perhaps the central theme of the work is an insistence that the nude is one of the most austere problems of design. The bulk of his analysis argues the continuity of this almost abstract design in the nude throughout Western art. He finds echoes of the design of the influencial classical works--Knidian Aphrodite, Laocoon, Apollo Belvedere, et al.--repeated and reworked, reasserting themselves after generations or even centuries. The most striking example of this that he gives is a comparison of a nude...
...terms of the human body. By one's very close to it, one cannot think otherwise. "Our continuous effort to keep ourselves balanced upright on our legs affects every judgment on design. The disposition of areas in the torso is related to our most vivid experiences, so that abstract shapes, the square and the circle, seem to us male and female, and that the old endeavor of magical mathematics to square the circle is like the symbol of physical union...
...best--his conclusions were sparse, but they seemed to come as discoveries. They exemplified the message that his later works elaborated: that if you make words only out of what you know to be true, and if these words are more often short than long, concrete than abstract, active than passive, the craziest-seeming truth may become clear...
...collection of 185 paintings and 220 prints, on loan from 75 museums and private collectors, combines a sense of the history and the quality oof American art. The exhibit ranges from the earliest beginnings, with reproductions of 16th century prints done by post-Columbian explorers, to recent abstract paintings, and includes some of Gilbert Stuart's famed portraits of Washington, an engraving by Paul Revere of the Boston Massacre, works by Benjamin West, Washington Allston, Whistler, Sargent, Homer, Eakins and Ryder. What the exhibition plainly shows is that a new school of painting sprang...