Word: abstracted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Abstract art, though it isn't the only or the greatest contribution the 20th century has made to art history, is certainly its distinctive movement. Nobody before 1900 had thought of painting a picture that didn't represent something--a face, a body, a landscape, a still life. The idea that art could be unmoored from appearances, that marks on canvas could convey emotions, spiritual states and pleasures quite independently of any reference to the world as we know it, had a long ancestry in theory. Plato, after all, raised the idea that there were certain perfect forms--the square...
...practice, it wasn't tried in any systematic fashion until after 1910, when the three founding fathers of abstract painting--two Russians, Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, and a Dutchman, Piet Mondrian--came, more or less simultaneously, to believe that pure form, in opposing what they saw as the deadly materialism of European culture, could open the way to a world of pure spirit. Abstraction would become a language, the key to utopian states of mental and social harmony that had been only dimly implied in art before. Abstract art would be the music of the spheres for the 20th...
This faith in a new world order induced by art collapsed soon enough; today it looks like a fossil from the early Messianic era of modernism. In fact, none of the more exalted claims made for abstract art over the past century have worn well. In the first flush of optimism after the 1917 Revolution, artists like Vladimir Tatlin hoped that abstraction, if made of the common materials used by workers, could lift dialectical materialism to a new plane and so become the basis of a popular art. These dreams ended in indifference and, for some, the Gulag...
...everyone was capable of the sort of rational thought necessary to understand abstract concepts like "plans" and "future." Some seniors could express nothing but the desire for sleep...
...Armour of God and the Police Story series (available in some U.S. video stores), are comedy fantasies, but they are also documentaries of the pain a great star will endure to please his audience. They have something else: a bracing athletic grace. The fights are as exuberant and abstract as the dances in a Busby Berkeley musical. And Chan is a superb physical artist, whether leaping off cliffs or hanging from a bus by an umbrella handle. As novelist Donald E. Westlake put it, "Jackie Chan is Fred Astaire, and the world is Ginger Rogers...