Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Alexander Calder's coat-hanger agglomerations of free forms twist and bob lazily on the breeze, exploit the possibilities for chance movement that reside in lightly balanced equilibriums. Lye's idea is to exploit instead the resiliences of high-tempered steels and flexible plastics. He raises simple abstract constructions of such materials on pedestals containing silent motor-vibrators. At a taped signal, the motors go into action, moving first slowly, then faster in a carefully calculated cycle, and the sculptures begin taking shape upon...
Manhattan's abstract expressionists have a new forum in the shape of a magazine with a softly assertive title: It Is Editor and Publisher: Philip G. Pavia, a Greenwich Village sculptor blessed with a private income, who loads his $2 magazine with full-page reproductions, offers ample space to the artists to explain, defend and expand on their own efforts. After three issues and yards of prose. It Is seems to have proved that the painters are at least as confused about their work as the public is. Sample quotes...
...these are insiders, who are the outsiders and what do they project? Rodman thinks that most abstract artists ride outside and project precious little. "The whole emphasis in art for the past hundred years," he maintains, "has been as much against society as possible. The critics say, 'This is art,' and so the public accepts it. The insider is trying to return to the aim of art in ages past; he is portraying the raw thing-not mere elegance or mere social concepts either. He is totally unconcerned with what kind of figure he cuts in the arena...
...repose, with only a skull for company, in peaceful contemplation. It has all the power of Caravaggio's drawing, which influenced Rubens. It is a striking example of Caravaggio's favorite color combination-red and black-which has influenced painters from Georges de La Tour to the abstract-expressionist Mathieu. It lifts realism to an exalted plane by making the figure a light in darkness, as Rembrandt was later to do. And finally, it offers deep insight into St. Jerome, whose devout, blunt, passionate nature appealed strongly to Caravaggio...
...Utopia. What is it that the U.S. has to teach Europe? Paradoxically, says Bruckberger, it can teach Europe to be non-puritanical in its politics. Europe has consistently sacrificed man in the flesh to theory in the abstract. The French and Russian Revolutions were Procrustean; if human beings did not fit the bed of Utopia, their heads were chopped off. The American Revolution, on the other hand, assumed that the state was made for man. The founding fathers, suggests Bruckberger, had the uncommon sense to recognize that the people "have no right to deify and worship themselves." Thus...