Word: abstracted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Britain is America's ally, but that abstract agreement is brought to life by personification, by the friendship and ideological comradeship of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Libya is America's enemy, but that enmity glowers as a private hostility between Reagan and Muammar Gaddafi. If the values of American initiative need commending, Reagan will shed his spotlight on a Mother Hale of Harlem, as he did in the 1985 State of the Union message, and elevate one woman to emblemize an entire economic and social theory. If heroism in war is to be honored, a single veteran will stand beside...
...most Renoirs. Indeed, some of Matisse's greatest work was done in those years. Why was this acknowledged so grudgingly, or not at all? For "ideological reasons," Co-Curator Fourcade argues, springing from a "modernist obsession" with Matisse's largely posthumous role as prophet of Paris-New York abstraction. If you assume that art history culminates in abstract art, then you may feel betrayed if your hero's work goes from flatness to depth, from a space built from blocks of color to one evoked by the illusion of light, from schematic drawing to fuller modeling...
Matisse, though, made no such assumptions. He was not an abstract artist but a magisterial painter of bodies and spaces. The specific did not just "interest" him; it was close to an obsession, for all the apparent generalizations of his style. Even in paintings of calm and predictable subjects, like the girl seated by a vase of flowers in The Black Table, 1919, one sees his hand evoking the most difficult conjunctions of sight and imagination -- in the way the transparent Turkish blouse is rendered by a few luscious strokes of white over the flesh, for instance...
This statement lacks the demonstrable authenticity that appears so consistently in all of Dubus' fiction, including the stories in this book. Abstract critiques of U.S. society seem puny amid the welter of details and telling observations that the author provides. In Molly, the title character, a 15-year-old girl, goes riding with her new boyfriend toward a beach on the Atlantic. She looks out the window at a succession of small, working-class houses: "In the faces of a group of teenagers who stood under a tree and watched her and Bruce passing, she saw a dullness she thought...
...Artisans made useful or decorative objects to enhance daily life. For American pioneers, making tools and furnishings was a necessity. But the 20th century widened horizons by elevating the craftsman's role. The Bauhaus influence in America allowed the artisan to become a partner of the architect. Later, the abstract expressionist movement in painting and sculpture, with its emphasis on individual statement, swept through woodshops and pottery studios as well as painters' ateliers. The show's organization is a declaration that craft has moved beyond the strictures of the useful and even the decorative. Its four divisions are the Object...