Word: abstractionists
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...awarded $8,500 in prizes. The awards were all safe as warm milk; granted to men who had won many prizes before, they ran the gamut from watered-down abstractionism to souped-up realism. Basket Bouquet, an impeccable and wholly uninspiring arrangement of lilac smudges by Cape Cod Abstractionist Karl Knaths, took first prize. It looked rather like a flat but tasteful Victorian sampler, translated into the smeary medium of oils. California's Rico Lebrun came in second with Centurion's Horse, a chalky, Picassoid nag, understandably hanging its head in a canvas as dark and narrow...
...center of one broad lawn, standing like a nightmare clothes rack with triangular metal planes hung out to dry, was a quivering Mobile by U.S. Abstractionist Alexander Calder. Sprouting from the grass like a strange new species of mushroom were a pair of coldly obscure stone lumps by Englishman Henry Moore, who had laconically dubbed them Carving and Sculpture. Near by perched two glistening, seal-sleek shapes entitled Crown of Buds and Bad Fruit, by ex-Dadaist Jean Arp. "The most obscene works in the show," commented one visitor, "but nobody realizes...
...Knowing. What riled the abstractionists was that the seven juries chosen for the contemporary show were on the side of representational, i.e., conservative, art. The juries were composed mostly of painters, and though some of those picked used moderately abstract techniques in their own work, there was only one out & out abstractionist on the list...
Hananiah Harari is a slick, meticulous commercial artist whose sharp-focus Coca-Cola ads, whisky displays (Old Sunny Brook) and magazine covers (FORTUNE) look even more real than the photographs he often paints from. He is also a solemn abstractionist. Last week Harari's "serious" paintings were on exhibition in a Manhattan gallery. They looked like nothing so much as houses built of cards for a game unknown to Hoyle...