Word: expressionist
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There is, however, a strand of painting that tends to miss out at both ends. It employs the human figure neither as a cooled-out sign linked to the imagery of mass media-like Katz, Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, Robert Longo-nor as a generalized hieroglyph for "expressionist" feeling, as in de Kooning or the new German painters. Such painting wants to inspect and describe the body as a real object in the world, in all its resistances, its actualities, its peculiar landscapes of pit and pore and hair. It wants to move outward from that to see its social...
...drowning swimmers and divers (like A Fish on the Back of the Adriatic Sea , 1980), heroes tormented by doppelgangers and harsh schematic landscapes-are elaborately ill-painted in order to support the fiction of terminal earnestness. This, of course, is the main trick in the repertory of neo-expressionist effects, and Cucchi does it over and over again. The best of his paintings here, The Mad Painter, 1981-82, seems to parody this condition; the rest simply deploy their accepted rhetoric of crudity as vitality. Artists of Cucchi's persuasion, wild pets for the super-cultivated, serve many useful...
...right. Nor are they absolutely spontaneous: he would often retouch the drip with a brush. So one is obliged to speak of Pollock in terms of a perfected visual taste, analogous to natural pitch in music-a far cry, indeed, from the familiar image of him as a violent expressionist. As William Rubin suggests in the catalogue to this show, his musical counterpart is not the romantic and moody Bartók: it is the interlaced, twinkling and silky surface of Debussy. No wonder that it took an enthusiasm for Pollock to provoke the re-evaluation of Monet...
...father of Californian ceramic sculpture, in the 1950s, was Peter Voulkos, now 57; a group of his pieces from those years begins the show. They record his decision-and it cannot have been an easy one 25 years ago-to apply the latent violence of abstract expressionist paint handling to the solid medium of clay: to twist, punch and slash the continuous form one expects of a pot's surface, opening it up to create the visible inner spaces that belong to sculpture. Compared with the best abstract expressionist Voulkos' sculpture (David Smith's, say), somewhat clumsy...
DIED. Bram Van Velde, 86, melancholic Dutch-born abstract expressionist painter; in Grimaud, France. Van Velde's life before World War II was almost a prototype of the lot of the unrecognized artist: hunger, despair and an unending search for patrons. After the war, he attracted supporters who saw in his work a sense of the absurd that reflected the existentialist experience. Commented Playwright Samuel Beckett: "He confronts without restriction and complacency the anguishes of our time...