Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...want to say everything, but end up conveying only your desperation. You enter Harvard Yard and think, "Well, this is the beginning of a new chapter in my life," and then try to write it without understanding the setting, the characters or the tone. But if that's too abstract, let's put it another way--you're like a large, black dog in a sea of blind porpoises. No, a jellybean nestled in the center of a goose-liver pate...
...overturn this hypocritical society, Marcuse did not urge a revolt of the masses. He disdained the working class for its materialism. The common people, he lamented, we're "disinclined to risk their relative prosperity for abstract and Utopian ideas." Revolution, he believed, lay with a special elite he described as a "democratic educational dictatorship of free men" in his influential essay, Repressive Tolerance. And the Utopia they would create? Marcuse was rather hazy except to suggest that somehow people could continue to enjoy all the good things of life without having to pay the price for them...
...modest. A high stamina of observation is entailed in the complicated whites and shadows of the tablecloth and housecoat, set down with Arikha's fugitive and worried scribbles of the brush. When he leaves his customary palette of white and earth colors, the results show his background in abstract painting: Canadian Envelope, 1977, with its immaculate placement of rectangles, its cross-rhymes of blue and red, seems as consciously organized as a Mondrian...
...motifs are not actors in a drama of pathetic fallacy, but resistant fragments of the world, the nonself. But what is so gripping about his work is the in tensity with which Arikha engages that world. He speaks of the "hunger in the eye" that drew him away from abstract painting in 1965, and kept him doing nothing but black-and-white brush drawings and etchings from life for eight years. In his paintings since 1973, that hunger is palpable, and it takes nothing for granted. "To paint from life at this point of time," he argues, "demands both...
...Penderecki: Violin Concerto (Isaac Stern, Minnesota Orchestra, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conductor, Columbia). Stern could easily coast along on the war horses of the repertory, so more power to him for continuing to stretch himself in challenging new works. This somber single-movement piece, composed for him in 1976, is less abstract, more late Romantic, than the experiments in shifting sonorities that made Penderecki's name in the 1960s. Over brooding drumbeats and pedal tones, Stern gets a virtuoso workout in involuted runs and dissonant double-and triple-stops. But what stays in the mind is the sustained, eerie high tones...