Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Bland & Bleak. Historically, the artists acknowledge a debt to the Russian constructivists, and have words of praise for the industrial approach of such sculptors as Alexander Calder and the late David Smith. They wax hot for Geodetic Architect Buckminster Fuller. Their enthusiasm for painters tends to focus on Barnett Newman, whose works are uncompromising vertical stripes, and Ad Reinhardt, whose severely dark-hued abstracts look almost jet black...
...creating their own academy of cool, they have produced a spartan art, aggressive and sometimes playful in its stark shapes. The viewer seems to be asked to overcome the chilly look of their bleak morphology, cloying pastel colorism and inert gigantism. Impersonal, almost deliberately dull, such objects require the maximum from the observer, offer the minimum in return. And if the viewer does not care to make the effort, he can well conclude that less is not always more...
...free elves, are not bores; malice and eloquence save them from that un-Irish condition. All of them turn on Trellis, afflict him with more boils (64) than Job's, and provoke him to a robust curse: "You hog of hell, you leper's death-puke!" A bleak, black coda to the book-within-a-book says enigmatically: "Evil is even, truth is an odd number and death is a full stop." Was Trellis mad? It is hard to say. Was he a victim of hallucinations? Professor Unternehmer, the German neurologist, allows Trellis "an inverted sow neurosis, wherein...
Dubious Honor. From one of the hemisphere's newest countries, Selassie was scheduled to proceed to one of its oldest-Haiti. There, conditions are so bleak under Dictator François ("Papa Doc") Duvalier that the country is hardly in better shape than when it won independence from France in 1804. Determined to give Selassie a proper reception, the government scraped deep into its depleted treasury for $100,000, used it to plant flagpoles along the two-mile length of road from the airport to the capital of Port-au-Prince, place festive flags all over the city...
...girl who married at 17, is now in the process of getting divorced. "My parents trusted me too much," she said. "In a way, it's too bad giving kids too much time for things they're not ready for." For her, the future is bleak. Said she: "I have a little boy of two and a little boy of four, and they're too much for me. I'm not grown...