Word: expressionistic
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Elementalism is the recurrent mood of Still's paintings. Many abstract-expressionist canvases allude, directly or not, to landscape. No American artist, however, has so consistently dealt with epic landscape as North Dakota Emigré Still. He is not, of course, a literal landscapist (sky at top, earth below). Yet there is every reason to see in his work a splendid addition to the romantic tradition of landscape, as practiced in Europe from Turner to Van Gogh and in 19th century America by the Hudson River School: a sense of vast, brooding presences, a pantheistic immanence, flickering with energy...
...Emperor of Atlantis resembles another expressionist work, Kurt Weill's Seven Deadly Sins, but it goes beyond Weill's elegant cynicism. The final chorale, describing death as part of life's "delight and woe," is sung to A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, while the orchestra counters with a cabaret tune of incredibly sweet pathos. From this juxtaposition emerges a requiem for a civilization literally going up in smoke, but the hymn's chords reassert the promise of redemptive life...
...Disks", which follow that painting in sequence down the ramp of the Guggenheim museum, blend almost imperceptibly into studies for "Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors." This painting is too large to be hung where it should chronologically be placed; one has to descend in suspense through Kupka's "pseudo-Expressionist," "pseudo-Mondrian" and "art deco" periods before finding it, at the bottom. "Fugue," painted in 1912, is indeed greater than anything else Kupka ever did. It represents a culmination of his nonprofessional interests--astronomy, music, and mysticism--as well as his artistic abilities: his skill with color, the grace...
...bolts, cleats and straps; the explicit logic of big practical structure. Pieces like Hankchampion (1960) are inseparable from that context. Its salvaged wooden beams, bolted together and strung with chain, are a homage to the plain speech of early industrial architecture. There is also a strong connection to abstract-expressionist painting. As James Monte points out in his catalogue essay, these weathered timbers were "a near-perfect analogue of the wide brush stroke in the painting of Kline and de Kooning...
...plates on an asbestos apron spread on his lap. In 1963-64 he was able to continue a series of bronze hands begun in 1958−fists, palms skewered by rods, fingers clamped to a balk of timber. These Rodin-like images of survival and defiance are full of expressionist anguish. As autobiography they are corny but moving. On the other hand, the earlier small steel pieces are generally disappointing. They seem clogged by graphic cliches and distended by a frustrated longing for bigness...