Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Most of the sculptures selected by the Whitney were abstract concoctions of spikes, bumps, lumps, bars and bits of string, and most were dreadful. But Robert Howard's slim pear wood Semaphore was there to show how elegant three-dimensional abstractions can be. Peter Lipman-Wulf's Horse and Man looked as if it had been made for fun from the contents of a carpenter's scrap barrel. Despite its casual air it was as tense and tightly constructed as anything in the show...
...hates: "When I get discouraged I look at Picasso's stuff and then I feel better about what I'm doing." He himself once flirted with cubism, "but I abandoned the lady very early and since then she has prospered under other patronage." The semi-abstract sculptures of Henry Moore, with their pinheads and pierced bodies (TIME, May 16), make Epstein smile. "A good cheese is not interesting because it's got holes in it," he says. "It's because of the quality of the cheese...
Lawrence Kupferman, of the Massachusetts School of Art, began the discussion. He observed that the modern stress on mathematics and the sciences has been one of the most important influences on abstract painting...
...reason is that artists in every age must reflect their environment; the fantastic, tense, bewildering civilization that we have today can be portrayed only in the abstract, he added...
...people who are engaged in a desperate struggle with ignorance and poverty ... to men who must work from sunup to sundown merely to keep alive . . . men who cannot read & write ... In their present condition, the immediate benefit of steel plowshares or smallpox vaccinations has more appeal than the abstract ideas of democracy...