Word: libermanism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...East German government is one of the most doctrinaire Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, in 1963 it flirted with the ideological heresy of "Libermanism," a theory that takes its name from its principal proponent, Evsei Liberman, an economics professor at Russia's Kharkov University. Libermanism emphasizes the profit motive and individual reward within the Communist system. Even today, the G.D.R. rewards increases in productivity more generously than any other East European country. As a result, there are East Germans-not all of them party insiders-who have accumulated enough cash to buy that most treasured of possessions...
...left a body of work that seemed the epitome of aristocratic breadth and daring. Newman's canvases, with their engulfing fields of color traversed by vertical "zips," had become intrinsic to the look of American painting. Artists as diverse as Dan Flavin, Kenneth Noland, Clement Meadmore and Alexander Liberman had been deeply affected by the radical openness of his art and his brave, grumpy polemics. Granted obvious differences of context and emphasis, Newman's work had acquired much the same ethical role as Poussin's did for young painters in the 17th century, or Ingres...
...Alexander Liberman is one of America's leading sculptors. His work has a stringency and a humanistic resonance that have seldom met in a sculptor's work since David Smith died. Yet his name is not always on the list of instant preferences that a curator might reel off. "I have always been plagued," Liberman sighs, "by suspicions that in some indefinable way I am not quite serious. And that's because I have a job." The job is as editorial director of Conde Nast; he has been there in one position or another since 1941, when...
Kinetic Metaphor. Control is the dandy's key, and Liberman's control is of a peculiar and highly tuned kind: it consists of letting two creative systems play with each other. On one hand, designed accident; on the other, a strictly organized language of geometrical form -circle, cylinder, triangle. "I like the steel to lie around in my yard, fallow," says Liberman. "Eventually some combination imprints itself on me: this sheet belongs to this rod; it attracts that tank end. It's very much a gamble." (His interest in chance as a provoker of form has existed...
...just as the chance is impure -being edited by Liberman's preferences-so too his shapes are not wholly abstract. A disk may allude to the sun, to a breast or to an altar; a triangle to a pyramid or a bird's spread wings. With its vertical masts and calm progression of red, sail-like forms, Odyssey, one of the monumental sculptures at Hammarskjold Plaza, suggests an archaic flotilla dipping through the Aegean. Sometimes a sculpture will work not as an object but as a kinetic metaphor of force. Ascent includes a blade of red steel that...