Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...would like to make something that is real in itself, that does not remind anyone of any other thing, and that does not have to be explained-like the letter A for instance." Thus one of America's first abstract painters, Arthur Dove, set up his version of the modernist hope. To visit the traveling retrospective show of 70 Dove paintings and collages that Art Historian Barbara Haskell organized for the San Francisco Museum of Art (it opens this week at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo) is to sense how difficult that ambition must have been...
...believe that one could extract "essences" from nature-shapes that symbolized different kinds of force, growth and élan vital, and that constituted the inner structure of reality. This belief, which owed as much to Mme. Blavatsky and her ilk as to Henri Bergson, was common among early abstract artists. Its embodiment, for Dove, was in works like Team of Horses (1911), one of the first abstract paintings ever made in the U.S.: the curling shapes, fringed with sawtooth edges and inset between thick dark lines, are like a premonitory flicker of art deco, but Dove's intent...
...buckeye clumsiness when off form (as this faithfully assembled show abundantly proves), the best of his work survives not as prediction but as experience. The dogged probity and sensuality of his reactions to nature were uncommon in advanced art; yet it was Dove, more than any other early abstract artist, who set what would become a motive of American painting down to the present day: the constant intrusion of epic landscape as the armature, the secret image, of abstract art. Robert Hughes
...best-known works. How outrageous, how iniquitous that tire-girdled Angora goat looked in 1959! What perversity seemed to lurk behind Rauschenberg's gesture of erasing a drawing by Willem de Kooning and exhibiting the sheet! How dandyist an affront to spontaneous sincerity, the idea of painting two abstract expressionist canvases, Factum I and Factum II, almost identical down to the last drip...
...isolate and segregate: thus, for example, " 'ethnics' are separated from nonethnics...the words themselves put people in 'ghettos,' and freeze them at opposite poles. It is in this way that we are manipulated by the words we tolerate and use." Fairlie echoes Orwell's warning against allowing abstract words to choose our thought and disguise from us the real meaning of what we want to say. But Fairlie is quick to differ with the author of "Politics and the English Language,""I have never been impressed with that essay," he writes, explaining that the politician is entitled to a language...