Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Leder's studio is cluttered with his work, all in a wide variety of sizes, colors, styles and media. There is a huge still-life on one wall; small washes on another; an abstract sculpture; a Spanish nobleman's portrait; a land-scape like one of Cezanne's. "An idiom," Leder says, "will emerge. I don't want to be tied down to any specific thing. Most painters are in their forties before their own particular way of painting emerges...
...Leder likes best some of his smaller works--a drawing of the Charles River and an oil painting of an Italian garden where he once studied. The best thing about the painting is "the abstract quality, the things alluded to but not defined," while in the drawing "it may be day or night; there's a lot of mystery and ambiguity." Leder says he would like to capitalize on that sense of mystery, but then again, he might decide a little later on that some of his other paintings, outstanding for different qualities, are really his favorites...
...Buddy Holly. You can also hear Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and the Band weaving among Springsteen's elaborate fantasias. The music is a synthesis, some Latin and soul, and some good jazz riffs too. The tunes are full of precipitate breaks and shifting harmonies, the lyrics often abstract, bizarre, wholly personal...
Irony and Narrative. Next to Miro and Dubuffet, the oldest painter in the show is Jean Helion. Having been one of the leading abstract artists in France between the wars, Helion returned to figuration in 1947. "I looked through my studio window," he recalls, "and I found that the outside world was more beautiful than my picture." He is now 71 and at the height of his powers. What pervades his paintings is a wry and original sense of human stance and gesture; under the cubist planes of the surface lies a marked appetite for the sensuality of commonplace things...
...like. When it came, it was indefinable: hundreds of thousands of young men existing like stupefied moles in the badly shored-up gutters of mud and decaying flesh that zigzagged their way across France, driven toward the machine guns of Poperinghe or the Butte de Warlincourt by the abstract decisions of rigid or incompetent staff officers. At 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916, 110,000 English and Australian troops started walking toward the rusty thickets of German barbed wire along the Somme valley; a few hours later, 60,000 of them were dead or wounded, and the cries...