Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Comic strips, says Waugh, abstract bits of American experience and endow them with a sort of idealized timelessness. Dick Tracy always catches the crooks he chases; The Nebbs always quarrel; Blondie and Dagwood always make up. It is part of the American daydream, he thinks, to be as courageous as Steve Canyon, as sexually irresistible as Smilin' Jack, as honest as Joe Palooka. In his harried, uncertain life, the American newspaper reader is greatly sustained by the certainties he finds in the comic strip, the movies-and nowhere else...
...biggest and strangest of its kind. There was hardly a recognizable landscape or embraceable nude to be seen. Said one headline: WITCHES' ORGY COVERS ART INSTITUTE WALLS. The directors of Chicago's usually middle-of-the-road Art Institute had gone all out with a survey of abstract and surrealist...
...average Manhattan gallerygoer will no longer jump and yell if confronted with an abstract maze or a surrealist swamp. But last week he had something to sigh with relief at: an exhibition as bright, pretty and woodenly realistic as a carrousel. The kale-green landscapes, rosy nudes and white-faced clowns all showed the hand of a contented craftsman. All bore a bold, neatly curlycued signature, Bombois, Clle...
Sepeshy had titled his prizewinning picture Marine Still Life. An intricate tangle of moorings, anchors, buoys and boats, it was laboriously pieced together from sketches made at Frankfort harbor, on Lake Michigan. Last year's winner-Karl Knath's abstract Gear-had been similarly composed from sketches of the Provincetown waterfront, but Sepeshy's was far more recognizable...
...colored patchwork of windows against a night sky. It had been painted by an unknown, 34-year-old Philadelphian named Henry Kallem, who submitted it without much expectation of winning a prize. Like last year's prizewinning What Atomic War Will Do to You, Kallem's half-abstract canvas bore a socially conscious title: Country Tenement. Explained Kallem: "My idea was to show how I felt seeing this scene one evening in the country-all the people crowded into one building with all that space around. I tried to achieve a somber mood...