Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Read opened the lecture, "The Idea as Human," with a statement of his basic thesis that human consciousness of reality is first made concrete in works of art and only later developed into ideas. "The plastic symbols of art," he said, make all our abstract cogitations basically possible...
...Fifth Century B.C. the Attic sculptors finally achieved this synthesis of the vital image of man with the geometric abstract of beauty which they had been seeking. It was this achievement of a true idealism in art which gave the world Humanism, and which was the unique achievement of Greek culture, Read said...
...intensity of expression until it approximates a squawk. Dunlop is basically a scholar and teacher, but he has an intense desire to merge the practical world with the academic. He likes to quote Whitehead: "It is the union of passionate interest in detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalization which forms the novelty in our present society...
...paintings were markedly more abstract than his earlier work. There was an architectural quality about most of them, expressed in long, vertical-lined backgrounds that gave a skyscraper dimension to his compositions. In Janitor, one of the show's best items, Zerbe set an old man with vertically furrowed face and sharply structural features against a background of high buildings. The man's face seems to be made of the same rough masonry as the building; Zerbe mixes mica, sand or flint with his plastic to give a rougher surface. Three Doors is a semi-abstraction in quiet...
Robert Motherwell's Collage is apt to strike laymen as just terrible, and young U.S. painters as just wonderful. His "abstract expressionism" might be defined as picturing nothing at all with a minimum of conscious effort-it makes art a game. Yet the thousands of contemporary artists who paint like Motherwell are a solemn lot on the whole, and as dedicated to their lonely games of self-expression as any academic realist is to copying things...