Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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These taxis in the old capital city of Kyoto wait outside the doors of the ineffable, of another Japan entirely. The Ryoanji temple's Zen rock garden?five austerely abstract boulder mounds set in a sea of curried sand pebbles?is a celebrated spiritual masterpiece. The garden is absolutely still, and yet tense with an obscurely bullying profundity. A guide whispers the sermons in the stones, the allegories: the rocks are, maybe, tigers swimming across the sea. Or they are whales rocking in the deep. Or perhaps they are these mysterious islands themselves: Japan. The abbot of Ryoanji...
This recipe could hardly be less like the ideal clarity and openness of traditional American abstract painting. It sounds like a terrible mess, but it does not cook out that way, for two reasons. The first is the strength of Alexander's imagery; the second, his formal control. Since most neoexpressionist painting is given to conventional signs for intensity but lacks formal rigor (a gut pile without shape), Alexander's work repays inspection...
...sure isn't. While abstraction still survives in art, the vision of the city as an abstract work of art and of houses as "machines to live in" is widely ridiculed and rejected today. Shivers went through Aspen's packed music tent last week (and not only because of the 30° F weather) when Peter Blake, chairman of the department of architecture and planning at Catholic University of America, showed slides of the future as envisioned in the past. The "ideal cities" of Leonardo da Vinci or Etienne-Louis Boullée, although devoid of people, were...
...readers agreed on the subjects of good and evil. Such has not been the case since roughly the time of Edmund Spenser and his Faerie Queene, yet Murdoch, a philosophy don at Oxford, has successfully built a career on this outdated literary genre. Her characters manifestly stand for abstract values; they are figures in a pattern of moral design and significance. The question in her fiction is not what happens but why. And allegory, in her hands, becomes a tool for testing, rather than affirming, beliefs...
...First there was regular public school in Brooklyn's Park Slope area. Afterwards, from four to six in the afternoon, while most boys were playing stickball, Hadzi attended a special Greek school. This triggered his imagination, he says. As a result, while his work is clearly grounded in American Abstract Expressionism. Hadzi's concerns have been classical. A romantic and a traditionalist, he has devoted most of in career to mastering the ancient technique of bronze cast...