Word: art
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...casual visitor, it looks like a typical boarding school for the overprivileged-300 acres in Stockbridge, Mass., a mansion, dorms, art studios, a gym, music rehearsal rooms and a barn, and 150 teen-agers so bright-faced and chipper that local residents say they can identify them by the "DeSisto glow...
...past two decades, Clyfford Still has enjoyed a reputation as the Coriolanus of American art. No other living artist has so vociferously loathed the art world as a system. None has managed to keep a closer control over the fate of his work. Since the 1940s, when he emerged as one of the founding fathers of abstract expressionism, Still has jealously guarded his output, releasing few paintings to collectors, rarely showing in private galleries, insisting on conditions of display that few museums were prepared to meet. Consequently, his farm outside Westminster, Md., houses most of his immense oeuvre; and though...
...clear," he wrote in 1963, "that a single stroke of paint . . . could restore to man the freedom lost in 20 centuries of apology and devices for subjugation." The Met's catalogue is stuffed with this kind of rant and salted with fulminations against the demons of the "corrupt" art world that make the Ayatullah's views on the Shah seem, by comparison, mere tickling. Nevertheless, Still's notes on the history of abstract expressionism, which sharply contradict some idées reçues of the official version, are largely borne out by the evidence...
Visionary ineloquence has a lot to do with native American culture, being woven into the American sense of the epic-and in painting, Still is its living example. His entire output is a repudiation of the cult of the "well-made picture." From the beginning, Still's art-unlike, say, de Kooning's-set itself in opposition to the cubist tradition with its small scale, ambiguities of space and geometric calibration. What he wanted, and had found by 1947, was a much simpler, grander and more declarative kind of structure: opaque, ragged planes of color rearing...
...tradition to which Still's work is related is heroic landscape, the art of the epic vista, as seen in 19th century America by painters like Bierstadt and Moran. No doubt, in some general way, his years spent under larger skies than Manhattan's, in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, contributed to the sense of vast atmospheric scale in his art. But to read it directly as landscape violates its meaning. The cliffs and ravines of color, the jagged rifts of blue or vermilion breaking through a matrix of dense enveloping black, are no metaphors of the Grand...