Word: abstracted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Both offers, however, drew opposition from a group of junior faculty members, who felt that the department could have a composer of greater international reputation, and should not have recommended an abstract theorist The scholars complained about the appointments in a letter to President...
Lawyers try to frame simple questions that give the youngster a concrete sense of abstract concepts. In the successful California prosecution of Kidnaper Kenneth Parnell, for example, Deputy District Attorney George McClure established his witness's competence by picking up a pen and asking the victim, Timmy White, then six, "Timmy, if I told you this thing in my hand is an ice cream cone, would it be the truth or a lie?" To put children at ease, some judges bend courtroom rules a bit. In one Seattle trial, a 5½-year-old witness was allowed...
...gargantuan bricoleur, a user-up of discarded things, a collagist in three dimensions. His work touched base with the fundamental modernist movements, seizing and transforming something from each of them. From cubism and constructivism came the planar organization of form and the abstract language; from surrealism, the sense of encounter with a "personage," as basic to his work as it was to Miró's. Given enough found metal, he could launch into runs of astonishing inventiveness, like a jazz virtuoso improvising on a phrase. This happened most notably in 1962, when he was invited to make a sculpture...
They still do, but today monumental is a husk of a word. In the past ten years, it has decayed to mean nothing more than "very big." American cities are now generously speckled with abstract ironmongery: sculpture that means nothing but is part of the perfunctory etiquette of urban development, most of it larger than it needs to be. Locked in a losing battle with the megacity environment, it manages to look both arrogant and depleted...
...Robert Rauschenberg is back; but then, the rumors that he had gone away were greatly exaggerated. It is almost 30 years since his "combine" paintings-rebus-like assemblies of every imaginable waste object, from beach tar to stuffed chickens, from electric fans to auto tires, slathered in abstract expressionist paint drips-burst upon the American art world. Nearly two decades, a lifetime for some artists, have elapsed since his first prize at the Venice Biennale (back when the Biennale mattered) heralded the "imperial" entry of American art into Europe. The unwanted reward of a career like Rauschenberg...