Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...California Split was a journey into gambling culture--how desperation and betting work at the tables, at the track, and in people's lives. The language of the film was energy cycles--how people key up and run down, how they invest energy and spend it. The theme was abstract and didn't need a story--the plot was unimportant, events didn't have to connect in conventional ways. Much of the undercurrent of ebb and flow was achieved by Altman's technique of using multiple-track microphones, so an audience could hear half a dozen conversations in a poker...
...look at Kline's work suggests a third possibility: namely, that the museum mail-order art survey course your man Hughes took included only one line about Kline (probably "Franz Kline -20th-cent. Am. abstract expressionist"). It's no doubt news to Hughes, but Kline went through a period of realism, including social realism. This is a painting by Franz Kline (not Ben Shahn) called Ex-Servicemen and the Unemployed (1941). As your man says, "One example will do for all." I'm afraid that leaves us with just one elementary howler: the one named Robert...
...Elton, money long ago became as abstract as grain futures. Paintings, jewelry and amusing baubles are what count, but most of his purchases become gifts. His U.S. agent has received a Rolls-Royce, his secretary a $2,300 raccoon coat. His manager got an $80,000 yacht and a $10,000 Faberge clock. Elton sent a Rembrandt etching of The Adoration of the Shepherds to Rod Stewart's 30th birthday party...
...painting is currently at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, according to the police, Pollock, born in Wyoming in 1912, painted in an abstract expressionistic style, laying his canvas flat on the floor, rather then standing it up at an angle...
...consistent reading in a library. To nail the dozens of elementary howlers in his text would require almost as many pages as The Painted Word takes. One example will do for all. Wolfe on social-realist art in the '30s: "Even Franz "Kline, the abstract painter's abstract painter, was dutifully cranking out paintings of unemployed Negroes, crippled war veterans and the ubiquitous workers with open blue workshirts and necks wider than their heads." In fact, he never painted such pictures. Either Wolfe is making them up, or he cannot distinguish between Franz Kline and Ben Shahn...