Word: abstract
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Shades of Significance: Tonal Values in Abstract...
...shame that the Fogg Museum has kept its current exhibition "Shades of Significance: Tonal Values in Abstract Art" underpublicized and virtually hidden behind an exhibition of antique clocks. The show opened December 11, but it has not received the exposure and recognition it deserves. The exhibition examines the uses of color and tones in abstract art, spanning from Picasso's Cubist collages to Louise Nevelson's monochromatic sculptural reliefs...
...exhibition consists of many abstract expressionists who confront and dissect the issues of color. In two characteristic works by Franz Kline, color is reduced to the essentials, black and white. He creates a world of undefinable forms and limited space through the use of thick brushstroke and straight edges. In Composition (1952), space is sectioned off by geometric forms, creating depth and volume within a closed space. The white has traces of black to reveal the underlying layers of the painting as well as to indicate the presence of the painter himself. High Street (1950) portrays a more complicated definiton...
...Shades of Significance: Tonal Values in Abstract Art" continues the fine season of abstract art exhibited at the Fogg Museum. The show raises interesting issues of the formal elements in art. More importantly, this exhibition acknowledges the emergence of abstraction as an evolutionary stage of art. At one time in the '60s, the Fogg was respected as an institution that supported the new developments of the contemporary art scene. One only has to think of Michael Fried's 1965 show, "Three American Painters," to be reminded of the golden days of the Fogg. Does the museum have the vision...
...result, the human figure, which for thousands of years was the container and vehicle of art's most exalted as well as its coarsest intentions, languishes in late-modern American painting like a vestigial sign, atrophied. This is not because abstract art attained its Utopian ends of making representation obsolete -- we all know it didn't -- but because the culture forgot that there was anything to do with bodies and faces except photograph them. It's as though America, maddened and warped by its own erotomania, its obsession with and fear of the flesh, and further blocked by its newly...