Word: abstraction
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Humanities concentrators spend much of their college career learning obscure Slavic languages, analyzing the small gestures in English literature, and acquiring a cursory knowledge of philosophy. They contemplate every abstract question but the one that’s been directed at them repeatedly by their parents: “So what are you going to do with that degree...
...massive" growth of government is a terrific issue in the abstract. It becomes more problematic when you get down to details: Would Rubio actually have turned down the stimulus funds that he criticizes Crist for accepting? In Florida, with its elderly population (receiving government pensions and government health care) and its exotic climate, Rubio's form of libertarianism is a fantasy. Indeed, after the wild hurricane season of 2005, Governor Jeb Bush was forced to offer homeowners a public-insurance option - private-insurance rates were skyrocketing - which quickly became the state's largest insurer. "Lord, save me from the purists...
...Keeffe, who owned a copy of Kandinsky's book, was no Theosophist, but like him, she felt that abstract art could express the artist's purely internal realities. In 1915 she was a 28-year-old art teacher stuck at a small women's college in South Carolina. One year earlier, she had been living happily in New York City and getting her first eager taste of Picasso, Braque and American modernists like John Marin. Stranded in a place she called the "tail end of the world," she decided to go where none of those artists had ventured. Drawing...
Like airplanes and antibiotics, abstract art is one of the defining inventions of the 20th century. But it's hard to say who arrived first at pure abstraction - images with no reference to the visible world - because abstraction is also one of those things, like calculus in the 17th century and photography in the 19th, that germinated in several places at about the same time...
...formed an artists' group with Franz Marc, Alexei Jawlensky and a few other like-minded painters, they called it the Blue Rider. (Blue signified spirituality to him.) And by that year, with his succinctly titled Picture with a Circle, Kandinsky was galloping full speed in the direction of complete abstraction. But for him, abstract images were also representations of a kind, correlatives of spiritual realities. He was an admirer of the Russian mystic Madame Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, a stew of beliefs about a spiritual realm that would someday replace the material world. Though Kandinsky's dedication to Theosophy...