Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...painting being so much more than its subject, you can't pin down an artist by naming his favorite motif. From Mondrian and the Russian constructivists on, many an abstract artist has gone for the stripe in all its apparent simplicity -- the line that baldly, mysteriously becomes a form in itself. Yet their paintings are not like one another's: there is no confusing the precise black vibration of a Bridget Riley with the effect of one of Barnett Newman's "zips" or the slightly blurred, funereal pinstriping of an early Frank Stella. Today the stripe continues to linger...
Since Myrdal, social scientists who study race relations have wrestled with the sometimes tenuous connection between expressed attitudes and personal behavior. As A Common Destiny puts it, "blacks and whites share a substantial consensus, in the abstract, on the broad goal of achieving an integrated and egalitarian society...
...centuries, a deeply rooted appreciation of nature has played a central role in the spiritual and cultural life of Japan. Japanese artists traditionally reflected this reverence not in intellectual abstractions but concretely, in highly stylized representations of specific rivers, mountains, plants and animals. As in other aspects of Japanese thought and behavior, artists were expected to remain respectful of the past and concentrate on certain well-established forms and techniques. But during the Meiji era (1868-1912), modernism was introduced from the West, knocking major dents in this rigid system with an emphasis on innovation, individualism and the search...
This includes Western art history and aspects of Japan's own cultural past. Osaka native Yasumasa Morimura, for example, places himself as the main character in carefully staged and photographed "reproductions" of well-known Western paintings like Manet's Olympia. Tomiaki Yamamoto melds brushy abstract expressionism with the pattern-oriented design sensibility of traditional Japanese textiles. Often his splashy tableaux resemble spread-out kimonos. Typically, as in Untitled, 1985, they are covered with an obsessive, all-over rash of heavily impastoed, drippy dots. Far less theatrical but also keenly focused on subject matter and technique, sculptor Katsura Funakoshi creates blank...
HELEN FRANKENTHALER: A PAINTINGS RETROSPECTIVE, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. In the '50s, Frankenthaler's lyrical washes of color had a decisive influence on abstract expressionism; today she ranks as America's best-known living woman artist. These 40 canvases from four decades show why. Through...