Word: abstractions
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Bill's originality does not simply lie in using mathematical shape-what he called "the building up of significant patterns from the ever changing relations ... of abstract forms." Rather, it comes from his intense effort to restore mathematics as inspiration, to recapture the frame of mind in which the first developments of perspective drawing had been made five centuries before...
...absurd. It also distorts the actual nature of his achievement. English romanticism always had an intensely realistic strain; its ecstasies of involvement with nature came from a meticulous observation of growth and form. This rarely happens with Friedrich, whose work (see color opposite) often had the peculiarly stiff and abstract character of a landscape assembled from prototypes. There is, for example, no way of reading Traveler Looking over the Sea of Fog (circa 1818) as a real scene; with his wind-blown hair and green velvet suit, Friedrich's Byronic wanderer is as incongruous on his craggy perch...
Friedrich's work, the Dresden painter Ludwig Richter remarked in 1825, does not deal with "the spirit and importance of nature ... Friedrich chains us to an abstract idea, using the forms of nature in a purely allegorical manner, as signs and hieroglyphs." Like other German Fruhromantiker (early romanticists) of his time, Friedrich had a penchant for introversion and metaphysical generalizations which the more pragmatic English romantics (except men like Blake and Coleridge) did not share. He filled his work with symbolism, most of which is lost to a modern viewer...
Crafted Skin. The show consists of Liberman's abstract paintings on the motif of a circle, done between 1950 and 1961. It is old work and put there to make an argument. Liberman, by and large, was left out of the accounts of New York art in the '50s; the very look of his paintings tells why. Rather than the complicated, relational colors of much abstract expressionism, Liberman used plain primaries. Instead of free drawing, he used ruler and compasses. Rather than drips and splashy brushwork, he went in for the most even and perfectly crafted skin...
...emulsion and creates a print on the paper. Brassai combined the man-made images created by cliche verre with mechanically produced photographs and created what he called "transmutations." Most of the pictures in the M.I.T. show are photographs of nudes which have been drawn over and changed into abstract designs reminiscent of Picasso's cubist distortions...