Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Museum of Modern Art opened a show of 22 European painters and sculptors who have gained prominence in the past decade. The choice betrayed the museum's natural predilection for unmistakably modern, i.e., abstract, work. But within the international mode, the exhibition displayed a surprising variety of national traits...
France was most heavily represented, with seven artists, and made the poorest showing. Its entries were mostly tasteful, but merely tasteful. Germany did better. Hans Uhlmann offered abstract metal sculptures that look gay as birds yet precisely engineered as bridges. Fritz Winter's contrastingly gloomy canvases showed what dim-lit richness a few masterfully placed bars and smears of color can assume. The British contingent was all grim, and saved from dullness only by the brilliant horror pictures of Francis Bacon (TIME, Oct. 19, 1953), who can make a painted face seem to shout out loud...
...abstract painters at the Whitney showed even more brass than the sculptors. They generally displayed huge canvases, as the fashion is, but made some concession to hanging problems by favoring very tall pictures instead of very wide ones. Most followed the lead of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, the proconsuls of abstract expressionism, in energetically weaving fat tangles of paint over their yards and yards of canvas. Yet taken for what it was-decoration-the effect was often charming. Such expert practitioners as Theodores Stamos, James Brooks and the late Bradley Walker Tomlin manage to enfold the observer...
...still capable of tongue-lashing friends and foes alike, as he did recently in The Demon of Progress in the Arts, a sharp assault on abstract painting and sculpture...
Miss Doub designs block printed fabrics for a Boston concern, samples of which are on view. The patterns are abstract and non-repetitive. Although they are handsome, one would hardly characterize them as unusual. This criticism carries over to her linoleum prints. There is no doubt of Miss Doub's technical skill, but, with the exception of some interesting experiments with fading colors, her prints are rather cold and unexpressive...