Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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SELECTIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS: THE ART OF JOHN MARIN, National Gallery of Art, Washington. John Marin (1870-1953), a gifted painter whose dynamic, semi- abstract seascapes and urban scenes made him one of America's leading modernists, is surely due for a comeback. Perhaps this comprehensive sampling of his works could be the start of it. Through April...
Things firm up toward the '80s. The picture that changed Moskowitz's style was Swimmer, 1977, a canvas bearing the head and raised arm of a figure in the sea. This figure is quite an abstract form, and it is embedded, heraldically, in a dark field of Prussian blue. From now on Moskowitz's work would look for strong, immediately recognizable icons that were submerged into abstraction by their elaborate, nondescriptive surfaces. They combine frankness of silhouette with loss of detail, and the effect is mysterious and poignant...
...moody Steichen photograph. But because the shape of the Flatiron Building is so close in value to its background, black on black, it induces a perceptual hiccup, like stepping off a step that is not there; for a moment you do not know whether you are looking at something abstract or not, and even when you have seen the building, the abstractness remains...
Moskowitz's roots lie in abstract expressionism: he studied with Adolf Gottlieb and married Jack Tworkov's daughter. His paintings clearly show that he feels the loss of the pristine Romantic tradition. He has an unaffected appetite for the sublime and its subjects: towers, cliffs, icebergs and heroes (even if we see only the backside of the discobolus, even though the thing in his hand looks more like a bowling ball than a discus). Just as clearly, he doubts if sublimity can be revived. His rendering of a Giacometti sculpture into a long, ghostly streak of thick white pigment...
...when you step back, and the details disappear, and the paintings become strange mosaics of jeweled color and gold. They take on an almost abstract quality. This is because Islamic art, unlike Western, was rendered in an intentional two-dimensionality. The works are fascinating because they are drawn from many viewpoints--there are no shadows to imply depth or perspective...