Word: hultberg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...tour produced the neatest bit of confusion since Lou Costello asked Bud Abbott, "Who's on first?" The Met's American Gallery Curator Robert B. Hale explained to Molotov's interpreter, Oleg Troyanovsky, that The Flying Box was the work of 27-year-old John Hultberg (TIME, May 2), an "expressionist-abstractionist." The painter, Hale added, was once a guard at the Metropolitan. Troyanovsky translated to Molotov: "He was formerly of the avant-garde...
...Hultberg, replied Hale, was a museum guard at the age of 21. "He was a member of the avant-garde at the age of 21," Troyanovsky translated to Molotov. Molotov shrugged his shoulders and gave...
...swift rise Hultberg can thank first a considerable talent, and second the fading of yesterday's fashion. That fashion was for "abstract-expressionist" pictures, which recoiled from perspective and recognizable three-dimensional shapes, instead relied purely on vast, flat swirls and puddlings of paint, paint, paint. Painter Hultberg, who once studied with two leaders of the school, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, was among the first to rebel against it. While the fad was still at its height, he walked Manhattan's 57th Street with his canvases under his arm, vainly trying to interest the dealers...
...pictures are semi-abstractions, but most look rather like landscapes. Hultberg borrows from De Chirico the trick of making deep, dark perspectives of converging lines. Instead of placing figures in his perspectives, Hultberg strews about a variety of three-dimensional symbols resembling portholes, ladders, wreckage, trap doors, sudden cliffs, wings and flying boxes...
...prevailing gloom is laced with latent excitement, for he fills his brush strokes with nervous energy and uses crude but dramatic color schemes involving generous clouds of black and ultramarine which emit red and white flashes. Composition is perhaps his strong point: like most of his canvases. Hultberg's Airport (see cut) looks elaborate as a house of cards, yet solid as a concrete runway...