Word: abstraction
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...country. Still living in Berlin slums. Käthe Kollwitz reached her 71st birthday as the show opened, remained the best German woman artist. Also shown was the work of mild, good-natured Max Liebermann, who died three years ago after his work was banned, not because it was abstract, but because he was Jewish. Franz Marc, represented by his famed Blue Horse, considered by many a critic the most brilliant of German moderns, was killed at Verdun in 1916, not before he had turned out vivid abstractions that run counter to Hitler's esthetic creed. But the casualties...
...Cubists went further, tried "to evoke emotions by the exhibition of colored forms" which did not "look like" anything in particular. But Ozenfant showed (by photographs of cubistic and surrealistic-like scenes from modern life, by reproductions of Egyptian and prehistoric art) that the paintings of abstract artists were related to the contemporary steel-&-stone world, or to the art of earlier periods. Painting has a vocabulary, as does literature, but its vocabulary is color and form; and Ozenfant's advice to painters is to eschew what is fashionable, ephemeral, frivolous in their use of this vocabulary...
Convinced that abstract art has served its purpose, Ozenfant now believes that it is waning, wants painters to work for the social world and to paint for everybody pictures that will be recognizable to everybody. In Seattle he is preparing an exhibition of his own painting, finishing a semi-autobiographical volume, dropping the oblique, off-hand remarks that distinguish his work far more than its formal arguments. Typical Ozenfant aphorisms: "It is not art that fails, but the artist." "Art is the demonstration that the ordinary is extraordinary." "Let us once a year . . . enjoy all our rights, including that...
...sent no pictures; the Kansas exhibit consisted of 14 tidy prints that might have been designed in a fastidious recoil from the ostentatious earthiness of Midwesterners like Thomas Benton and Grant Wood. That State committees were an unpredictable factor was equally apparent in the State of Washington exhibit, predominantly abstract, and the Massachusetts collection, which was academic, mythological, and as out of tune with its neighbors as a choir at a Benny Goodman swing concert...
...ancient Egypt is the clean-sloping, massive 20th-century dam. Nearest thing to Egyptian stone-carving is the work of modern sculptors who feel that if they could surpass its life-loaded repose they would touch the summit of their art. Appreciation of such forms is not purely abstract. Through the imaginations of writers as diverse as Emil Ludwig and Thomas Mann, the civilized life of the Nile has begun to intrigue common thought as Classic Greece intrigued it for centuries. In Never to Die, a neat, lucid book on Egyptian art and Egyptian writings, a little more dust...