Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...haunted by the unhappy examples set by many of their elders, who, if they had had sagacity, could have bought a fortune in paintings hot off the easels of their contemporaries. Mid-20th century U.S. painting offers just such a challenge. Will posterity view the volcanic eruption of abstract art as one of the U.S.'s most dynamic periods? Museums all over the country are now hedging their bets by cautiously buying contemporary abstractions. One museum that has decided to buy as if there were no doubt is Buffalo's 52-year-old Albright Art Gallery...
...Contemporary Art," where moderns were hung experimentally, then either acquired permanently or resold. This system, widely copied by other museums, was carried on by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, now head of Yale University Art Gallery, and current Albright Director Gordon M. Smith, 51, who switched the emphasis to U.S. abstract expressionists. The result of the Albright's venturesome buying is a modern collection that ranks in quality right behind such mammoth institutions as Manhattan's Modern Art, Whitney, and Metropolitan museums...
Buying together and separately, Patron Knox and Director Smith have preferred the-quick to the dead, have made some startling acquisitions. Examples: ¶ Composition in White (opposite), by Jean-Paul Riopelle, 34, one of Canada's two leading abstract painters. In Paris, where Riopelle now works, his larger canvases bring as high as $6,000. Working in intense bursts of creative activity (22 paintings last month) and laying on paint with meticulous palette-knife strokes, Riopelle is a moody painter. His Composition in White grew out of a trip to Austria. "The snowcapped Austrian mountains reminded me of Canada...
With the dizzying growth of science and technology in the 20th century, Philosopher Francis Bacon's 16th-century dictum that knowledge is power has come fully and prophetically true. Advances in abstract scientific theory can promise or threaten next year's breakthroughs in the technology of national power. And on the sidelines of the science-technology race, the backward nations, eager for progress and wary of winding up in the loser's camp, watch intently to see how Russia fares in competition with the West...
Certainly this has been done in mathematics. Modern mathematics is highly complex, extremely difficult and abstract. Also, as an Institute report says, "It is self-contained, self-sustaining, and almost self-generative." A small body of professors, combined with a relatively small group of students, or members, can create a community of mutual discussion and consultation in which the entire field comes under surveillance. The Institute claims with almost complete justification, "A mathematician may come to the Institute and be quite confident that he can find out anything really important in current work in the field...