Word: abstractions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Josef Albers, 88, abstract painter and influential art teacher at Black Mountain College and Yale; of heart disease; in New Haven, Conn. The German-born son of a house painter, Albers studied and taught-along with Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky-at Weimar's Bauhaus, the renowned laboratory-workshop of craft and design. When Hitler closed the Bauhaus in 1933, Albers came to the U.S., where he meticulously painted geometric patterns, notably squares within squares, and taught his students to see the ways colors interact. "His criticism was so devastating that I wouldn...
...Western art. Only one shape in our cul ture seems to rhyme with the strict parabolas of a tachi's profile: Brancusi's Bird in Flight, with its soaring curvature, immaculate surface and absolute finality of line. The resemblance is not merely formal. Just as the abstract contour of the Bird is rich with allusions to nature, so the blade contains landscapes...
Oscillating Campaigner. For all the admiration of Stevenson's intellect, he was rather indifferent to abstract thought. He finished in the middle of his class at Princeton, then flunked out of Harvard Law School. That embarrassing event was not brought up in two presidential campaigns because the dean, a Stevenson admirer, kept the proof locked in his personal safe. But after earning a law degree from Northwestern University, Stevenson embarked with gusto on a career of public service...
...wood and sand, and maybe, just maybe, the sound of something human. A woman coos in a muted voice, as if she were speaking through bed sheets. A man wails deep; his anguish, supposedly lashed to a sexual moment, is only the synthetic spawn of the recording studio--artificial, abstract. A chorus of women chant undecipherable orisons to some street-wise goddess of love. Their voices are synchronized to a single, thin line; you can't tell if there are three, ten, or thirty women singing...
Rahman too exhibits the strange conflict about politics that the students I interviewed displayed: an avowal of disinterest in politics coupled with clearly "political" opinions in the abstract linked, in turn, with a fear of talking about the subject in the particular. Rahman left Dacca on August 21, and says he knows next to nothing about what's going on there now: there have been two military coups since he left, but he isn't moved to discuss them for publication...