Word: abstractable
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...disappointing to see an author write a book called Ideas and the Novel when the best she can manage to explain her theme is: "The nature of an idea, surely, is to be abstract i.e. the polar opposite of the concrete" or "a universal which we can ophosister according to our own taste and antiquarian knowledge...
...didn't make it easier," she says. She decided to seek out in Munich a famous avant-garde teacher named Hans Hofmann-the same artist who, a year later, would emigrate to America and play a formative role in the ideas and practice of abstract expressionism. It was Hofmann who made her look at cubism, "the key to my stability ... Positive and negative. A block of space for light. A block of space for shadow. Light and shade are in the universe, but the cube transcends and translates nature into a structure." On seeing her first cubist Picassos, Nevelson...
...what was mythic and magical in sculpture just as a yearning for the primitive, the instinctively efficacious, was diffused throughout the American avant-garde in the 1940s. It was the root of Jackson Pollock's and Mark Rothko's early work and became an essential part of abstract expressionism in general, as it was of dance through the influence of Martha Graham...
...oeuvre includes much public, commissioned sculpture. On the public scale, the suppleness of intuition tends to stiffen and is replaced more often than not by a mild form of self-parody. The old cliché was the bronze general on horseback, humiliated by birds. The new one is the abstract ashtray by some Top Name in the windy downtown plaza, victimized by creeps with spray cans...
Thomas Hobbes said citizenship is based on the people's abstract consent to the authority of the state. But his theoretical notion can not capture the real emotion of submitting to the sovereignty of a new country. Although many who accept United States citizenship look upon the formal procedure with apathy, the social contract it symbolizes is a source of great enthusiasm and pride, an opportunity to begin a new life in a still very new world...