Word: goghs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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They felt a compulsion to go on from where the post-impressionists (Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne) left off, and an itch to show that you can forget nature (almost) and still paint pictures...
Three years later, in 1886, Gauguin tried to find new security in the hedged, rock-buttressed fields of Brittany, and succeeded only in learning how to compose his paintings better. In Aries, where he went to visit his friend Vincent van Gogh, he learned something about translating sunlight into arbitrary colors (chrome yellow, red-violet). Said he in his journal: "Though the public had no suspicion of it, two men were performing there a colossal work that was useful to them both." The work ended when Van Gogh went mad, chased Gauguin down the street with a razor, then went...
Gauguin had gone far beyond the hurried lyricism of Claude Monet (whom he once collected), but he seldom banged the brasses like his fellow pioneer Van Gogh. His island landscapes had a muted harmony which reminded U.S. eyes of moist June afternoons seen through Polaroid sunglasses. The honey-colored people who lived in them possessed the gentle strength and warmth of his models, the wooden stiffness and empty-eyed thoughtfulness of their idols. Each painting was an elaborate, somber tapestry of colors that no other artist had yet dared to weave...
Chicago's show, "Drawings Old and New," would have been even more blasphemous to the French perfectionist. On exhibition were a Van Gogh landscape made of a briar patch of angry, tangled pen strokes; a Picasso drawing of two nudes which looked like sacks of coal (and another which might have been a doodle by Raphael); Group of Draped Standing Figures (headless) by British Sculptor Henry Moore; a wildly sketched, toad-faced "Conqueror" hoisting a stein of beer, by Mexican José Clemente Orozco. But even Ingres might have been willing to admit the simplicity and tenderness of Sculptor...
...color television, unveiled equipment developed since V-J day. For an hour, an ingenious new receiving set was tuned in on a filmed fashion show and football game, a Disney color short. The broadcast was over ultra-high frequency, radar wave lengths. The reception, as vivid as a Van Gogh painting, made black-&-white television look antiquated. Boasted CBS: "the insurmountable obstacles" have been hurdled; in a year, if the demand is great enough, color television can be in the U.S. home...