Word: expressionist
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...usual welter of abstract expressionist shows around Manhattan last week, the one at the Saidenberg Gallery stood out by reason of its quietness, tenderness and lack of pretension. Gyorgy Kepes (pronounced Keppish) is the first to concede that his work looks pale beside that of more "muscular" practitioners of abstract expressionism. Their art, he adds mildly, "is like therapy; in a desperate situation one has to hit at whatever there is to hit. But there is danger when the defense mechanism becomes a gesture that everyone uses...
...Whitney Museum's annual exhibition of contemporary American art, on view in Manhattan last week, included one picture each by 145 painters. Nine out of ten exhibitors, many of them formerly figurative painters, had joined the abstract expressionist ranks. Despite some brilliantly decorative items, their combined effect was as loud and dreary as a bowling alley from the pin boys' viewpoint...
...Daddy of Dadaists. The scrappy text suggests that the author followed a method once used by Duchamp for writing music-he drew notes and musical markings out of a bag at random. But the volume makes up for the grab-bag text by reproducing almost every known work of Expressionist Cubist-Surrealist Duchamp, from his mustachioed Mona Lisa and famed Nude Descending a Staircase to the catalogue cover he decorated with a foam-rubber breast and the caption: "Please touch...
Despite Piet Mondrian, not all Dutch artists are squares. The most noted American abstract expressionist, Willem de Kooning, is Rotterdam Dutch, and his opposite number in Europe, Karel Appel, is Amsterdam Dutch. Last week Appel both enthralled and infuriated the home town with a major retrospective at Amsterdam's Municipal Museum. Appel himself stayed in his house in Paris. "I can't stand Holland," Appel confided fiercely, "for more than two or three days...
Boff & Grunt. His frankness interlarded with frenzy and his open face barred with a villainous black mustache, Appel happily plays the abstract-expressionist role. Painting, he says, "is a battle! Boff goes the paint! It explodes! It's an adventure! It's destroying what I've done before!" At the easel, he swirls, smears and stabs with tubes in mid-squeeze, a palette knife, his hands and, occasionally, a brush, grunting as he works. In a few hours, the picture is done: a wet, gaudy mass of color violently heaped and stirred. Sometimes it is a brutally...