Word: abstract
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DIED. Clyfford Still, 75, uncompromising American painter of gigantic, abstract expressionist canvases who was determined to pursue an American art form free from the "sterile conclusions of Western European decadence"; of cancer; in Baltimore...
...glows, offering opulent testimony to the improvements in Tiffany's taste and technique as he grew in age and experience. The windows begin with panels that look like little more than paintings (not very good ones, mostly of the Burne-Jones persuasion) and go on to the increasingly abstract and incandescent color of Tiffany's later works, such as Pumpkin and Beets, 1900-05, as abstractly designed as any action painter might wish. Also on display is a solid representation of Tiffany's famed lamps and lampshades (one recently brought $360,000 at auction...
DIED. Philip Guston, 66, influential U.S. painter; of a heart attack; in Woodstock, N. Y. The Canadian-born son of Russian immigrants, Guston joined Jackson Pollock, a schoolmate of his in Los Angeles, and other contemporaries like Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko in forging the abstract expressionist movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the past decade he returned from his often dreamlike works to representational painting. His explanation: "I got sick and tired of all the purity. I wanted to tell stories...
...Naum Gabo, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, wanted to serve the new power of the left by combining revolutionary art with revolutionary politics. Russian constructivism was, in fact, the only heroic modernist style that drew its strength from the revolutionary impetus. Yet its sin was in being abstract, and for that it was consigned to darkness by Stalin and his cultural apparatchiks after...
Most unofficial Soviet art is earnestly provincial, dotted with quotations from Western modernist styles -abstract expressionism, Pop, minimalism-which cannot be assimilated properly because of the scarcity of information: one copy of a Western art magazine affects painters more, in this samizdat atmosphere, than do five museum shows in Manhattan. But the surprise is that such art exists at all. The dissident artist must expend so much energy on survival that he has less left for self-development. There is still no room for him in a society whose art has one purpose: to reinforce the narcissism of state power...