Word: abstraction
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...which has served to confuse an entire generation, remarked of John Ferren in Everybody's Autobiography: "He is the only American painter foreign painters in Paris consider a painter and whose painting interests them. He is young yet and might, only perhaps nobody can, do that thing called abstract painting. The minute painting gets abstract, it gets pornographic...
Although 1) a great many artists have been doing more or less abstract painting for 30 years, and 2) most of it can be pornographic only to the pornographic, Pundit Stein's judgment of Artist Ferren made some sense last week in Paris when the Galerie de Beaune displayed 18 of his new works. Critics found them fully abstract, only remotely Freudian, with more depth and movement than most abstract paintings. This was because Artist Ferren has the .inventiveness to paint curving forms in space which are as interesting and satisfactory to look at as, say, a page...
That Artist Ferren's new, colorful pastels thus differed from the "flat" school of abstract painting is traceable to his training. A pleasant young man with brown hair and a bright orange mustache, John Millard Ferren, 33, started as a sculptor in 1926. He learned plaster casting in a Los Angeles plaster factory, tombstone cutting in San Francisco. As aids to the problems he was trying to work out in stone, he found himself covering sheets of paper with abstract drawings. In 1930 he began to paint, in 1931 worked his way to Paris, where he found a market...
...Sargent and Chase was superseded by two major influences: 1) realism from New Yorkers Sloan, Bellows and Luks, 2) Cubism from Parisians Braque, Picasso, Duchamp. It is Biographer Rourke's thesis that Charles Sheeler, by conspicuously keeping his head through a wild & woolly period, "submerged" the French abstract influence in native U. S. forms just as "real" as the street scenes of the Realists and more significant. These forms Sheeler found first in the old farmhouses, barns and functional handicraft of Bucks County, Pa., where he spent weekends for ten or twelve years. Surfaces and textures he studied with...
...Newport, Mrs. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's exhibition of 15 pieces of sculpture, ranging from small bronzes to a huge plaster Rock Group turned out to be more popular than a show by 20 contemporary painters which opened at the same time. Aside from a group of abstract studies that local critics defended somewhat uneasily, paintings at the Newport Art Association exhibit included the veteran Edward Hopper's oil Sun on Prospect Street, Charles Burchfield's water color Black Iron, the work of John Marin, Thomas Benton, Reginald Marsh, Henry Yarnum Poor, others as eminent...