Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Frankenthaler painted it after a trip to Nova Scotia, whose coast is plainly visible in it: the pine-forested mountains and humpy boulders, the dramatic horizontal blue. It was made flat on the floor, like a Pollock, and records the influence of Cezanne's watercolors, as well as abstract expressionist painters whom Frankenthaler had studied -- in particular, Arshile Gorky, whose looping organic line is reflected in her sketchy charcoal underdrawing. For all its size, it is an agreeably spontaneous image (and was painted in one day), pale and subtle, with a surprising snap to its trails and vaporous blots...
...would, in certain ways, remain an abstract expressionist at heart, a painter who loved spontaneous gesture and the kind of unforeseen imagery that popped out of it. From the big red hand (of God?) that appears in Eden, 1956, to the shamelessly romantic sky space that hangs behind the lavender blobs of pigment in Sacrifice Decision, 1981, one sees traces of the surrealist ideas that had formed Pollock -- an openness to the kind of unsought private image that was generally barred from color-field painting. Frankenthaler disliked programs and was not a self-conscious avant-gardist...
...years, it has been landscape (its closeup detail and far extension, its variety of light and color) to which Frankenthaler's images were kin -- if not in descriptive convention, then certainly in general feeling. You know before you read the label that it is the sea, and not an abstract blue surface, that spreads out in Ocean Drive West...
...often in recent years, Frankenthaler seems to have been content with the merely evocative. "Soapsuds and whitewash!" was the cry when Turner exhibited his more abstract seapieces, but it seems to apply more properly to Frankenthaler's atmosphere-laden abstract paintings of the '80s, with their elaborately swoony brushwork and cunning embellishments of not-quite- naturalistic light. They are very assured but seem a touch overpleased with their own sensitivity. Yet it would be a pity, all the same, if the present decade's recoil from the inflated historical claims made for color-field painting stopped one from enjoying this...
...classroom. Says Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers: "Schools are not organized according to the way most people learn. We might be more successful if we structured learning in schools more like the way things are done in the real world -- with apprenticeship-type programs connecting abstract symbols to the solution of real problems...