Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nevertheless, the look of Islamic art is overwhelmingly abstract and, to a Western eye, puzzlingly so. This is partly due to the circumstance that, illiterate in Arabic, a Westerner cannot decipher the inscriptions or savor the interplay between conceptual and visual meaning in Islamic calligraphy. One can visually enjoy the writing on an 8th century Koran page: the angular Kufic script done in a swordsman's strokes, decisive and muscular; the rich gold foliations round the white chapter heading; the placement of red dots, fit to make Mondriaan despair. Nevertheless, it is frustrating not to be able to read...
Until a century ago, most people in the Western world worked on the soil or on the sea. Time was measured not by the abstract division of matter and motion but by the exigencies of wresting one's livelihood from nature. In 1790 (the year Franklin died) more than 90% of the population of the then United States (a total of almost 4 million people) worked on the land. The rhythm of life was shaped by the feeding of the animals, the sowing of the soil, the lambing of the ewes, the harvesting of the crops in a daily...
...appearance of orderliness in the pages of the Register and the abstract, highly distilled information it provides give it a simplicity that is its greatest flaw. And yet there are hints that beneath the Freshman Register's tranquil, even complacent surface lies a conception of Harvard that is neither simple nor static. It is possible to spend hours staring at tiny representations of people one knows--representations that already belong to the past, photographs, concentrations, sometimes even names hopelessly out of date. What blasted hopes are hinted at by the obsolete ambitions expressed here to major in such fields...
Amoral Pleasure. When Englishmen of Smith's generation (he is now 44) started looking to America, what caught their eye was less the painterly heroics of abstract expressionism than the "media landscape"-to borrow a phrase of the day-from which Pop art was sprouting. Though as a painter he was not interested in the icons of popular culture, Smith was fascinated by its mechanics, particularly by what happened to color and form in reproduction. The green in a color ad was not like grass; it was mint green, menthol green, a hue of such insinuating and saturated lushness...
...paintings at the Green Gallery in 1961 used the simple, emblematic formats of ad layout-a disk, a heart, striped bands-but dissolved them in a feathery, airy film of brush strokes. Then he became interested in packages. Again, packaging was not iconic; it was the most abstract way of putting a product over, smooth and low-keyed, with a regular boxy shape. Paintings like Piano (1963) thrust out from the wall, the sloping canvas sides of the built box contradicted by the smaller fake boxes painted on it in Smith's cursive, soft handwriting, like a festive ziggurat...