Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...swift rise Hultberg can thank first a considerable talent, and second the fading of yesterday's fashion. That fashion was for "abstract-expressionist" pictures, which recoiled from perspective and recognizable three-dimensional shapes, instead relied purely on vast, flat swirls and puddlings of paint, paint, paint. Painter Hultberg, who once studied with two leaders of the school, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, was among the first to rebel against it. While the fad was still at its height, he walked Manhattan's 57th Street with his canvases under his arm, vainly trying to interest the dealers...
Several things counteract these advantages, however, instructors admit. Adults are less fluent with abstract concepts in general and have usually forgotten the techniques of learning developed and practiced in college or school days. In language course they find it more difficult to memorize, although that may be an advantage in other studies, one teacher observed. Many adults, unaccustomed to class recitations, are even more reluctant to participate than most reticent undergraduates. "And a leader of industry doesn't relish correction by a professor half his age," one professor commented...
...well as a number of styles. No. 1 "Torso" is a realistic treatment of the traditional nude. Instead of idealizing the body Gusils prefers to make it very fleshy and animal like. Irregular proportions and a relaxed posture help accomplish this. The same subject is teated in increasingly more abstract styles in three other works. No. 6, a marble nude, approaches a watered down cubism. As in the work of the contemporary Italian sculptor Martini the limbs are almost conical in shape. A more extreme example of this type of form is found in No. 11, "Centaur," which looks like...
...posed each seene with the care of the Japanese artist who spends hours arranging a few leaves and a flower into a composition of harmony and meaning. Whether the camera peers out between the spokes of a wheel at a moment of battle, or whether it regards the almost abstract lines of Japanese architecture, the eye always has enough time to appreciate the conscious beauty of the subject. The film thus breathes a calm spirit which not even the turbulence of the story can break...
...with the "real art," the 108 paintings and 22 sculptures by 67 U.S. artists was a bewildering sea of unknown names and works. Small groups, picking favorites, quickly formed in front of Ben Shahn's Squash Court and U.S. Primitive Joseph Pickett's Manchester Valley. Contemporary U.S. abstract art proved almost too much to take. Among the sculptures, only Richard Lippold's shimmering construction of chromium and stainless-steel wires and Alexander Calder's familiar mobiles drew much appreciative comment. French artists took a hard, professional look at Jackson Pollock's chaotic drip paintings...