Word: abstract
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Richard Diebenkorn, 59, is by fairly general consent the dean of California painters. A former Marine who began his career in the San Francisco Bay Area, Diebenkorn started as a representational artist in the 1940s, became an abstract painter, returned to the theme of figure-in-landscape in the 1950s and then, from 1967 onward, gradually began to make himself a world reputation with a sequence of essentially abstract canvases that he christened the "Ocean Park" series, after the section of Santa Monica where he now lives. Yet there was nothing veering or arbitrary about the changes in his approach...
...father of Californian ceramic sculpture, in the 1950s, was Peter Voulkos, now 57; a group of his pieces from those years begins the show. They record his decision-and it cannot have been an easy one 25 years ago-to apply the latent violence of abstract expressionist paint handling to the solid medium of clay: to twist, punch and slash the continuous form one expects of a pot's surface, opening it up to create the visible inner spaces that belong to sculpture. Compared with the best abstract expressionist Voulkos' sculpture (David Smith's, say), somewhat clumsy...
DIED. Bram Van Velde, 86, melancholic Dutch-born abstract expressionist painter; in Grimaud, France. Van Velde's life before World War II was almost a prototype of the lot of the unrecognized artist: hunger, despair and an unending search for patrons. After the war, he attracted supporters who saw in his work a sense of the absurd that reflected the existentialist experience. Commented Playwright Samuel Beckett: "He confronts without restriction and complacency the anguishes of our time...
...system is not just failing to perform properly - failure is built into the system. Communism stifles the best while rewarding, or at least exploiting, the worst in human nature. Imagination, initiative and man's natural inclination to improve his own lot have all been sacrificed to the abstract and deceptive goal of a common good that is actually neither common nor good. At the same time, the system seeks to make virtues out of man's less fortunate qualities, particularly his susceptibility to the corruption of power when he has it and to submissiveness when he does...
...material gains and quality of life; only two weeks ago, in fact, the latest such British study indicated that fully 96% of Britons can now scrub in either a bathtub or a shower, and 55% have central heating (that supposed bane of British life). But never before have the abstract social and moral values of Europeans been measured as they were by the E.V.S.S.G...