Word: irwin
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...such homegrown mutations as the weird, surrealistic offshoot known as funk centered around San Francisco. Los Angeles' particular contribution is an array of bright young individualists who espouse the belief that the object is what is important, not what it represents. "We are going beyond abstraction," argues Robert Irwin, who at 40 is something of a guru to the group. Irwin's own works are illuminated disks set against a white wall. Others in the group vary widely but are united by a common dedication to "cool" materials far divorced from the conventions of oil paint and bronze...
...Fridericianum are the signal-flag squares of German-born Josef Albers, who lives and works in the U.S. They are accompanied by the shaped, geometric and op canvases of his many European and American admirers. A room is lit with the disks of California's Robert Irwin (TiME, May 10). Highceilinged, cathedral-like galleries are filled with the gigantic rainbows of U.S. color-field painters and the authoritative sculpture of the U.S. minimalists...
...Irwin is concerned, this adds up to a transcendental experience. "What you finally have," says he, "is no beginning and no end, but a series of physical experiences moving on to infinity." To experience infinity, New Yorkers should first call at Manhattan's Jewish Museum, where five Irwins are on view. Once there, the viewers are expected to contemplate each work for at least 30 minutes-which is what Irwin does. As time passes, lights and blushes interweave; the shadows on the wall seem to march up and join the painting, until the spectator may well feel as though...
...Irwin's technique, therefore, is to turn off the spectator in the very act of turning him on. Not all enjoy the treatment. When Irwin's early canvases were shown at the 1965 Sao Paulo Bienal, Brazilians were so incensed that they slashed, kicked and spat at them, presumably while the guards were not looking. Manhattan Collectors Burton and Emily Tremaine hung an Irwin in their art-filled living room, found that it haughtily negated everything else there "like a nun at a cocktail party." Reluctantly, they took it down...
Irwinophiles who survive the initial discomfort say that they eventually discover an ineluctable serenity in the artist's work. The National Gallery's assistant director, J. Carter Brown, considers Irwin one of the most talented artists to come along since Mark Rothko. The Metropolitan Museum's contemporary-art curator, Henry Geldzahler, bought an Irwin in 1962, despite the fact that looking at it made him "feel ill and weak all over." It now hangs in his bedroom, where he maintains that it exerts "a calming effect...