Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...others rushed to see what neither public nor experts had ever seen before. The walls of the gallery were covered with 120 oils and oil sketches, nearly 100 watercolors and drawings, scores of lithographs and etchings. The result was like a window on the birth of abstract art. The early canvases-impressionist landscapes, academic portraits, saccharine fairy-tale scenes-gave little hint of the revolutionary innovations to come. But suddenly (1908) the Bavarian countryside is seen in patches of fiery yellows, blues and greens. By 1910 color is triumphing over form, as a church steeple sways insanely in a polychromatic...
...Blue Horses. As Kandinsky developed from his Fauve to his abstract period, conservatives in his group rebelled. Kandinsky, Gabriele, Marc and Kubin walked out on them, soon to be joined by Jawlensky, Campendonck, Klee and Composer Arnold Schoenberg, who at the time fancied himself a painter. They formed der Blaue Reiter group. The name was thought up by Kandinsky and Marc over a cup of coffee. "We both loved blue," Kandinsky later recalled. "Marc loved horses, I loved riders. So the name came naturally...
After launching abstract painting, the group was quickly broken up when the war came in 1914 and Kandinsky had to leave Germany. At first Gabriele joined him in neutral Switzerland. But when he went to Moscow, she returned to Munich, and the end came in 1916 after a final three months together in Stockholm. Gabriele's black mood was reflected in the bleak, burnt-out landscapes she painted on the ship going home. One year after Kandinsky left her, by then divorced from his first wife, he married the daughter of a Russian general; he survived the Communist Revolution...
...Muller, 34, German-born painter who came to the U.S. in 1941, is another Hans Hofmann pupil who still sticks by his abstract teacher's general principles but feels, "Abstract art is too esoteric. The image gives one a wider sense of communication." Now hitting his stride. Muller appears in all three museum shows. His Of This Time, Of That Place (opposite) at the Whitney is a large-scale (4 ft. by 8 ft.) canvas with looming white nudes set against a luxuriant patchwork landscape that draws its theme from Goethe's Erlk...
...Helen Frankenthaler. 28, well-to-do Bennington College graduate ('49), a standout exhibitor in all three shows who ranks high with the elder Abstract Expressionists as one of the few painters to follow in their wake, manages to give her intensely lyric, free-flow paintings a recognizably personal stamp. Up to using anything from a paint pot to her foot to gain her effects, she occasionally relaxes by switching to a meticulous landscape or realistic self-portrait. Says Painter Frankenthaler of her abstract work, "I just start to see what happens. You want clues? There are no clues...