Word: abstract
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...been a long time since abstract art was a religion. For most artists now, it's just an option, a mode they can pursue or ignore as it suits them. But once it was a passion, a polemic, a faith. Wassily Kandinsky, one of its founders, could talk about geometric forms as though they were sacred images - and to him, they were. In a burst of high feeling he could argue, with a straight face, that "the contact between the acute angle of a triangle and a circle has no less effect than that of God's finger touching Adam...
Like airplanes and antibiotics, abstract art is one of the defining inventions of the 20th century. But it's hard to say who arrived first at pure abstraction - images with no reference to the visible world - because abstraction is also one of those things, like calculus in the 17th century and photography in the 19th, that germinated in several places at about the same time...
...inclusion of two twin works by abstract painter Alma Thomas, however, speaks volumes more to the President and First Lady’s political and artistic leanings. The first of these two works, entitled “Watusi (Hard Edge),” is a painting directly inspired by Henri Matisse’s paper collage “L’escargot,” the second, a fabric-like abstract work in blue called, “Sky Light...
...Museum in New York. A lifelong schoolteacher, Thomas’ commitment to art education is perhaps explained by her own denial from many public museums as a young girl. While much of her early work was marked by a distinct realist style, as she aged, her work became increasingly abstract. With this in mind, “Watusi”—whose name stems from the 60s era song-and-dance craze, as well as the Batutsi tribe of Rwanda—can thus be read to be as much a product of Thomas’ lament...
...become a Jesuit priest, Guillemin’s desire to become an artist turned itself into a full-fledged career; after studying art in college, he became a copyist at the Louvre and returned to Boston to found his own gallery. However, he eventually grew concerned with his artistically abstract lifestyle...