Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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However, this book is more than just an intro to the coldwater SoHo loft that is Frank Stella's mind. Stella has assigned himself the second task of uncovering the origin of the "crisis of abstraction," the growing consensus even among practitioners that contemporary abstract art bores the hell out of people. Stella attributes this yawning chasm between potential and performance to the flat, two-dimensional quality of the abstraction of the 1970s and '80s, heir to the tradition of highly colored "decorative" paintings exemplified by Delacroix and Malevich...
WORKING SPACE stands as a valiant attempt by Stella to drag abstract painting back on the road of progress. But it's just one more intellectual breakdance in a field overrun by rhetorical jivin' and poppin'. After all, abstract painting is a mental art. Since abstraction is the mental process of selection and exaggeration, abstract art requires the intellectual equivalent of a Captain Video decoder ring to translate a picture into ordinary concepts...
...typical abstract artist picks and chooses the elements of sight that please him, becoming more and more recondite as his career goes on. Eventually the artist reaches the point of no return: painting so stripped of concrete meaning that it becomes mere interior decorating, the fate of the Mark Rothkos and Morris Louises of the world. "It clashes with my sofa," is about as much as you can say about this sort of ultra-abstraction...
...been enlarged in the past few years with some distinguished purchases and gifts, particularly in the areas of cubism and German expressionism. Furthermore, the first show in the Anderson building, an extensive anthology by LACMA's senior curator of 20th century art, Maurice Tuchman, titled The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (see box), breaks new ground in the study of abstract...
Quick, now: which had more influence on abstract art? Picasso or Jakob Bohme? Freud or Annie Besant? The theory of relativity or Robert Fludd's Utriusque cosmi? The answer, as anyone can attest after seeing the opening exhibition, "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985," in the Los Angeles County Museum's new wing is in each case the latter. The good news, one might say, is that early 20th century abstract art, long regarded by a suspicious public as basically meaningless and without a subject, turns out to have a very distinct and pervasive one -- the last mutation...