Word: abstractedly
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...edited a picture of art history New York City's museums have lately been giving their public. Here is an American artist of real distinction, now 74, a contemporary of De Kooning, Rothko and Pollock, with whom he appeared in the famous photo of The Irascibles, the cast of Abstract Expressionism, in LIFE magazine in 1951. Nevertheless, he has virtually been dropped from the history of the New York School. At most, Pousette-Dart has had a sentence or two (and not always that) in the standard history books; none of the influential critics of the '50s backed...
Pousette-Dart has always had his following, of course, and in any case it would be idle to put his early work in the '40s and '50s on the same level as De Kooning's or Pollock's. He certainly shared the early Abstract Expressionist interest in primitive art, totems, archetypal forms. And its general legacy from '30s Picasso too: Pousette-Dart's Portrait of Pegeen, 1943 (the subject was the deeply neurotic teenage daughter of Peggy Guggenheim, his dealer), is heavily dependent on Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror. There is also a scary Expressionist insight to the chaotic...
...effect is to downplay nature in favor of culture. "Nature does not satisfy art," one finds in Pousette-Dart's copious notes, cited in the catalog, "but art satisfies nature. Nature is dumb, while art is conscious, articulate, triumphant." This aesthete's idealism sounds unduly high flown. What abstract painting really rivals, in point of organization, the structure of a leaf? But what counts, in the end, is the paintings the idealism serves, and many of these are extraordinarily beautiful...
...matters of justice, women are less concerned about abstract rights or wrongs and more interested in finding compromises that maintain the social contract. In her provocative 1982 book In a Different Voice, Gilligan offered an example. A boy and a girl, both 11, were asked whether a poor man should steal a drug that would save his wife's life. Yes, said the boy, because human life is worth more than property. No, said the girl, who suggested that he borrow the money or work out a payment schedule with the druggist. Her reasoning: If the man stole, he might...
Species preservation depends upon political resolve. Costs of conservation can be stunning, appearing all the more so when weighed against the abstract value of a species. Increasingly, biologists intent on saving a species are heard to cite either its usefulness to man or the dangers to man attendant upon its loss. Thus the tropical rain forests are said to hold medicinal, agricultural and scientific wealth. This kind of argument, credible as it may be, reflects scientists' perceptions that only appeals to man's self-interest will generate public support for conservation. But anthropocentric arguments legitimatize the notion that species must...