Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Benton became a surrogate big daddy to replace Pollock's own woundingly absent father. Thus the future avant-gardist had for a mentor a man who hated abstract art. But when Pollock came under Benton's tutelage, he wasn't aiming at abstraction. Benton's way of composing, with its heftily twisting figures and buckling, scoop-and-bump space, was based on 16th century Mannerism--Midwestern El Greco and Tintoretto; he even adapted the Mannerist device of reducing the figures to geometrical dolls, sometimes modeling them in clay. This vehemence, locked up as a system, appealed to Pollock...
...totemic"--in mythic images that were either lost to modern, Euro-American culture or buried so far back in its origins that they seemed mysterious and exotic. Pollock in the late 1930s was a boy in deep emotional trouble, drinking like a fish and undergoing Jungian analysis. Like other Abstract Expressionists-to-be (Mark Rothko, for instance), he was on the lookout for archetypes and dark, unconsulted levels of feeling, in the hope that art could release his inner shaman, antlers, rattle and all. Hence the portentous "mythic" subjects of his pictures (The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, Pasiphae...
...Handbook for Students notes that "speech not specifically directed against individuals in a harassing way may be protected by traditional safeguards of free speech, even though the comments may cause considerable discomfort or concern to others in the community." This appears to indicate an abstract commitment to free speech despite unpleasant consequences. When it comes to how this policy is applied to concrete cases, however, there seems to be some ambiguity and room for interpretation on the part of College officials...
...scrapes, even the claw marks of the grabs that hoisted the plates. And yet these traces, which one might think would be brutal, acquire--given the enormous scale of the pieces--a beauty that almost amounts to delicacy. The run and layering of red oxidation reminds you of Abstract Expressionist painting. More than that, it recalls nature itself: there are moments, particularly in the double-ellipse pieces, when walking between the rusty walls is almost like being in a red-rock gorge...
Sources: New York Times; Park Central Hotel; Playboy; Statistical Abstract of the United States; Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries...