Word: abstractions
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Andrew Wyeth of Chadds Ford, Pa. (pop. 140), and Cushing, Me. (pop. 130), stands high and apart from the mainstream of American art. Manhattan-centered abstract expressionism has in the past two decades given a multitude of new answers to the central questions: What is painting? What is art? What is form? Wyeth is no heroic rearguard defender against that trend. But, in a tradition going back to Rembrandt and to the roots of art, he insists on exploring something else: the condition of nature and the depth of the human spirit...
...crooked hip joints, which give him a gangly gait. Instead, at a time when U.S. art was at a virtual standstill, he churned out vigorous, splashy watercolors that explored flattened space, joyous color and jumpy line in such a way that they could have marked him as a nascent abstract expressionist...
...foreigners recognize his existence, although the abstract expressionists are well known abroad, and even the Pop artists have attained some vogue. When Bernard Dorival, director of Paris' Museum of Modern Art, was asked about Wyeth, he replied, "Who? But perhaps we pronounce his name differently here." Wyeth returns the compliment. He has never felt the need to go to Europe-or, for that matter, to much of anywhere else that is very far from Chadds Ford or Cushing...
Wyeth feels that if he wants to find exotic things, he need only explore a couple of miles beyond the gas station at the Chadds Ford crossroads. But if he does not first learn his own small world to the last detail, how will he abstract the vibrancy and vitality from it, how will he record the unexpected, the out-of-kilter, the sudden clap of distant thunder? So he has chosen to follow the advice of Poet-Painter William Blake and see a world in a grain of sand...
...state had violated Article 7 of the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, and that the doctrine of natural rights demanded that the prisoners’ shackles be burst asunder post-haste.If human rights advocates are to establish a relevant global code of ethics, they must jettison this language of abstract rights in favor of a consensus anchored in the universalist elements of cultures around the world. Advocates must sincerely acknowledge cultural context in order to effectively address issues of common human welfare. The platform of human rights must shift from supracultural abstraction—“universally rational?...