Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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TIME'S Dec. 12 cover story on "Toycoon" Louis Marx is a pip. I have an anecdote that involves Mr. Marx: several years ago, at Vallauris, France, Irving Berlin and I met Picasso; he'd been making abstract statues-incorporating broken bits and pieces from his children's toys (one creation had a tin washbasin in its stone stomach and a toy propeller imbedded in its navel). We promised to send the children some new toys and asked Louis Marx to ship a few and bill us (which he never did). Santa Marx sent a huge crate...
Inward from War. The drawings were obviously studies for paintings Marc hoped to make some day. Each was a fully thought out composition and had been executed with an extraordinary mingling of boldness and delicacy. They showed that Marc was still moving towards abstraction, might eventually have grown as abstract as his friends Kandinsky and Paul Klee...
...being a creature in and of conflict, therefore revolted him. "Early in my life," he once explained to his wife, "I found man ugly, and animals seemed to me lovelier and purer; but even in them I discovered so much conflict [that] my representations became even more schematic and abstract." Marc's method was to bind the animals he painted into strong, elaborately rhythmical compositions. That made them seem atone with their environment, which was the state he himself longed for. He transformed their animality with flashing colors; a horse might be sky blue or fire...
...friend. Gauguin wrote: "I believe it is one of my best things; quite incomprehensible, of course, so abstract is it. It looks at first like the head of a bandit . . . the eyes, mouth and nose are like flowers in a Persian carpet, thus personifying also the symbolical side. The color has nothing whatever to do with nature . . . Through all the reds and purples run streaks of flame as though a furnace were blazing before one's eyes, seat of all the painter's mental struggles. And all this on a background of chrome yellow with childish little bouquets...
...inner-directed art." ¶ The New York Herald Tribune stated firmly that "whether or not you like Pollock's painting, or think the results no better than color decorations, one must admit the potency of his process." ¶ Art News explained that Pollock's work "sustains the abstract-size scale toward which his vision has probably always been directed. It is a 'cosmic' scale because of the multiple overlay and continuous spiral movement in conjunction with the non-figurativeness." ¶ Arts summed up: "A Pollock painting, charged with his personal mythology, remains meaningless...