Word: artful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...palatial rooms of the Metropolitan Museum. New York is celebrating the works of art that have burst from its veins in the past 30 years. Displacing the European collection from its usual galleries an overpowering group of works by New York painters and sculptors of 1940-1970 calls for a contemporary audience to note the monumental discoveries in art...
...abstract imagery of geometric shapes and drips of paint in most of the works at the museum frees the art from connotations of material aspects of culture. The monumental size of the paintings gives them inescapable presence. Once in the room, the viewer cannot change the channel-he must look. The power of an undiluted red surface with stripes of white on each end by Barnett Newman stretches beyond the viewer's field of vision if he stands close. To see the whole he must stand back. By their sheer size the paintings scream for recognition, protesting the decreasing space...
Though many of the minimal works on display at the Metropolitan could be reproduced exactly by anyone with correct instructions from the artist, the particular choice of proportion, composition, and color can make a work of art and not merely a decorative design. Beside reflecting the phenomenon of mass production, the possibility of infinitely reproducing a piece of art declares its indestructibility. Existing as a concept to be executed at any given moment, art defies the limits of its physical state and grabs for immortality...
...TIME the viewer wends his way through rooms of colorists, the confrontation with Pop Art jolts his senses. Though from the same environment as the abstract artists, pop artists attack different questions concerning the nature of art. Like masters of still life, they select subjects from the material world around them. By boldly painting things from Commercial America, they attempt to smash the aesthetic values of European traditional art. In spite of flashes of popular success, the movement has failed to undermine standards, and to move beyond its initial inventions...
Though some have criticized the show for not being totally representative of current American art in its selection of works, never before has such an exciting large group of contemporaries been assembled. It is a feast of hues and shapes that draws you into the process of discovering the possibilities left to painting and sculpture. Before the entrance of this show at the bottom of the long stone staircase in the museum, your eye is pulled through space above to a white mobile. The presence of this Calder bird prepares the senses for their audience with the reigning court...