Word: abstract
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Congressmen rail against the Pentagon budget in the morning, and then in the afternoon make it clear that the military base in their district must not be closed. Leadership at that level finds it hard to decide between the general abstract and the personal local...
Rothenberg first appeared in the mid-'70s -- a time when figurative painting was still Out -- with, of all things, pictures of horses. These were more emblems than descriptions: bold, rather clunky equine silhouettes embedded in flat, abstract space, with the totemic air of cave paintings. Their primitive look was, in fact, quotation; it was clear from her knowing use of close-valued color and her pasty, elegantly manipulated pigment that she was already an artist of considerable sophistication. What was not clear was where she could take this quasi-heraldic imagery if she was going to hold...
...retrospective affirms the panache and mental horsepower that make Frank Stella the grand maximalist of abstract painting...
Stella had to kick free of the literal basis of color-field painting; the flat color on a flat plane, the "dictatorship of the medium," had killed off the project of making abstract forms that, by moving in deep pictorial space, reawakened one's sense of the body. His way of doing this, in paintings from the Indian Birds series like Ram gangra, 1978, was to get rid of the solid back plane and replace it with a mesh support, so that the shapes seemed to hang in the air. The relatively sedate movement of form in Stella's earlier...
...long afterward, the vogue for graffiti would release floods of glitzy dreck that shared the same eye-grabbing fervor. Indeed, both were grounded in the same area, a sense of common life, but only Stella was able to make it work aesthetically. Those who think abstract art should betoken "spirituality" are bound to be put off by the materialist cast of mind that lends its here-and-now toughness to even the most florid of Stella's works. Relentlessly inventive, marred only by the glaring, grinding overcomplication of some of his pictorial machines, he is a paragon of mental horsepower...