Word: abstraction
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...whole sequence of events to this point show a great development for Ophuls. The settings (in particular the use of foreground objects) and the relatively static camera and quick cutting emphasize the fixity of Lola in her settings. Ophuls does not develop a romantic personality in the abstract; he derives the meaning of her life from her changing position and motion in a setting. The inescapability of Lola's physical settings, her existence in the physical world, is the reason her ambitions are defeated--but it's also the basis of her fleeting triumph, moments in which her integration with...
...students exhibited here make the most exciting images when they deal with the human figure, a disturbing subject that has never been completely eliminated by abstract art. Even fragmented, dissolved, the figure maintains its appeal. The most striking sculpture is composed of sixteen editions of the same white face, like a plaster death mask, wedged into square compartments of a metal grid, like eggs in a box. Gliding in a sequence like words in a paragraph, the heads are tilted at slightly different angles. shifting with every position, the shadows redefine the expression on each colorless face. The head, locked...
...vector for romanticism. Left-romantics want to change people because they despair that systems can be changed or because they believe that systems will change to fit the change of people's needs. Left-unromantics (pragmatists?) want to change the system to change the man (or perhaps for more abstract reasons, justice, etc.). George Orwell, in his essay on Charles Dickens, recognized the trends, saying, "They appeal to different individuals, and they probably have a tendency to alternate in terms of time." We are now, perhaps at midphase, the most difficult time...
Because the paintings of these founding fathers were mostly abstract, art historians have generally argued that Abstract Expressionism was a descendant of analytical Cubism, or the abstractionism of Russia's Wassily Kandinsky. Curator Rubin argues that the style's most immediate ancestor is Surrealism. His case is convincing...
Lingering Symbols. The dream totems and the enigmatic pictographs of the early canvases of Adolph Gottlieb, Pollock and Rothko also betrayed surrealist origin. As Curator Rubin observes, the moody, poetic, apocalyptic spirit that broods over explicitly surrealistic pictures lingers in the later, totally abstract canvases of these same artists. To emphasize this point, Rothko's Magenta, Black, Green on Orange is placed in a small, partially darkened, melancholy chapel-like gallery, while the spiky Gothic tracery of Clyfford Still's painting, 1947-J shares a gallery with four other Stills-and a spiky Gothic metal sculpture by Theodore...