Word: abstractedly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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John Canaday deplores most abstract expressionist art-and that opinion fuels a bitter feud. For Canaday is art news editor of the U.S.'s leading newspaper, the New York Times, and abstract expressionism is the U.S.'s most important school of art. Last week the feud, smoldering for months, broke into flame...
Canaday, 54, came to the Times in 1959 after a career of teaching (University of Virginia, Tulane) and heading up the educational activities of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Almost from his first column, he infuriated the abstract expressionists, chiefly by the wicked suggestion that although what they painted might be art, it could also be fraud. He lamented the school's influence, questioned its competence, doubted its goals, even predicted its eventual demise...
...night last fall, 14 artists, critics and friends were gathered at the apartment of Abstract Expressionist John Ferren, and after getting themselves into a suitably angry mood by reading old Canaday columns, they decided to strike back. Last week they did so in a letter to the Times, denouncing Canaday for insinuating that they had the motives of "cheats, greedy lackeys or senseless dupes...
...result, South African society is a "technological collectivity rather than a community." Because people know little about each other or themselves, she said, the novelist must first provide self-knowledge for his readers. Thus, although "the abstract Africa is becoming part of the elemental consciousness of the rest of the modern world through man's deep feeling that he must lose himself to find himself," the South African novelist must deal with his country in concrete terms. He is not yet ready to write the "pure novel of imagination...
...began as a realist ("That was what we inherited"), passed through a stage that was "allied to surrealism," finally went wholly abstract. By 1947 he was already turning out compositions of floating colors. In the years since, Rothko has achieved an almost elemental simplicity, which he likes to explain in more complicated fashion. ''In our inheritance we have space, a box in which things are going on," he says. "In my work there is no box; I do not work with space. There is a form without the box, and possibly a more convincing kind of form...