Word: abstract
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...partisans of U.S. art muttered that Carnegie Director Gordon Washburn himself was to blame for the poor U.S. showing, that he had ignored some of the most promising young U.S. painters. But the most baffled reaction of all came from gallerygoers who were left frankly bewildered by the preponderantly abstract show. Last week Director Washburn tried to set at least the gallerygoers straight. Said he to a Pittsburgh Press reporter...
This year one glance was enough to tip off the jurors to what was in store. Of 35 oils hanging in the central gallery, only three (including one by the late Fernand Léger) were remotely representational. The steadily mounting flood of abstract painting, instead of subsiding, has now surged across all national boundary lines and established itself as the international style of the mid-20th century. After spending the past year combing dealers' galleries, museums and artists' studios across the U.S., Europe and Latin America, Carnegie Institute Art Director Gordon Bailey Washburn, charged with hand-picking...
...indicates that something important is missing in most of today's art. Said former Louvre Curator René Huyghe: "Art today aims to shock. In effect the artist spits on the canvas, delivers a punch in the eye. I prefer fruit on a napkin." Italy's leading Abstract Painter Afro in part agreed: "There is too much concern with surface effects, an attempt to make them appear 'modern,' even if this means contempt for color. What is missing is a maturing process, a depth of spirituality." For Boston Museum of Fine Arts Director Perry Rathbone...
...Social Realist Ben Shahn, 57, the obvious fact was that today abstract artists and their public are poles apart. Said Shahn: "The great subject of Western Art has always been the crucifixion. At times painters have focused on the landscape behind, at times on the still life in the foreground, but the great subject must be there. Unfortunately, from time to time a generation of painters has to be sacrificed while artists re-explore the potentialities of their tools. This seems to be such a generation...
Director Wellman has set up in his CinemaScope panel some splendid images of human mass in roil and flow, and Cameraman William H. Clothier has almost magically cajoled California into looking like China, with the gauzy seascapes, the abstract arrangements of seines in sunlight and the ochred skies. But the blunt point of the pictute is to display John Wayne to best advantage-stripped in a bathtub, bloody at the wheel, phlegmatically stirring his bayonet around inside a Communist. As usual, he makes a more convincing display than most of Hollywood's he-men can. And when Lauren asks...