Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with at least half a dozen companies elbowing their way into national prominence and the best known of them, the Steppenwolf collective, capturing a 1985 Tony Award as the nation's best regional theater. While much of the rest of the American theater seems overrefined, elite and abstract, the Chicago troupes have built an enthusiastic mainstream audience for what many of the artists characterize as "rock-'n'-roll theater," rough-edged, noisy, pulsating with energy, appealing less to the mind than to the heart and groin...
...past 25 years, a pyramid of hagiographic paper has been raised over the tomb of abstract expressionism. Its artists, we have been told ad nauseam, shifted the focus of modern art from Paris to New York; Moses-like, they led American art from provincial darkness into the radiance of history, opening nothing less than a new chapter in the epic of American self-esteem, and so on, and so forth. So much money and institutional clout have been poured into and around the pyramid that it now seems as fixed a historical construct as that of Cheops. Nevertheless...
...same time, there was never much interest in his early efforts. The paintings of industrial landscapes from his youth, city streets, bar scenes and alienated clowns (Nijinsky as Petrouchka, done from an old photograph, was a favorite image) were seen, if at all, as a mere prelude to his abstract work. They did not look as "interesting" as the early work of his colleagues because Kline was the only abstract expressionist not touched by surrealism. He painted as though he had never seen a Miro. And so Franz Josef Kline, named by his Pennsylvania saloonkeeper father after the Austrian Emperor...
...reputation, Rhapsody, 1975-76. It consists of 988 images, each done in model- airplane paint on an identical square of white-enameled steel. There are --to oversimplify this strangely permutational work, which fills a whole gallery in the present exhibition--four figurative motifs (house, tree, mountain, sea), three abstract ones (square, circle, triangle), three kinds of drawing (freehand, ruled, dots) and a wide but fixed number of standard colors, used straight from the can, never mixed on a palette...
This is the humor of an outraged moralist, a writer who takes his corruption and evil seriously. Much contemporary satire gets by on contrived conspiracies, abstract villainy and stock victims. The Building offers an older and more enduring view of human nature. Its characters get no points for race, religion, origin, social position or physical condition. Sin is apportioned without prejudice. The only salvation is madness or art, which may be the same thing. One tenant lectures to cockroaches; a painter cannot turn off his vision: "If he stops it will continue to come, escaping through his head into...