Word: libermanism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...kinky images? Some think it is nothing more than a scream for attention from photographers and editors who find their audiences increasingly difficult to shock. Alex Liberman, editorial director of Conde Nast publications, considers it "just an experiment with something new, a trend, a moment of spice." Feminists take a darker view. "Men are feeling guilty and sexually threatened," says Cambridge, Mass., Teacher Jean Kilbourne, who lectures on the influence of the communications industry. "The image of the abused woman is a logical extension of putting the uppity woman in her place." Many psychiatrists agree that the trend reflects...
Chance-the random drip, the unsought image-bulked large as an issue among New York painters then. Liberman built chance into his work in a typically calculated way. He planned his accidents. Two early pictures in the show were done by tossing poker chips onto a canvas, marking where they fell and painting in the dots. The circles vibrate optically; the whole performance suggests a gambler's desinvolture, but preserved, fixed, a gesture trapped under glass. This way of stabilizing chance gives Liberman's early work its unique flavor, both improvised and severe enough to verge...
...understandable that Liberman did not attract much attention in the '50s. What seems incomprehensible is the way his work was publicly ignored while being covertly raided by other artists in the '60s. Though nobody holds the copyright on circles, Liberman's use of them predicted the target motifs of 1960s color-field painting...
...When Liberman sent paintings out to be fabricated by craftsmen or sign painters in the early '50s, other artists frowned on that as "mechanical." But in the next decade, when preplanned works made to the artist's order became an "issue," Liberman, who by then had gone back, or on, to a splashier style, was criticized for being too obsessed with the handmade object. He had exploited optical dazzle in works like After-image (1955) long before Op art was ever heard of. His use of chance and planned matrices foreshadowed the later interest in serial and process...
...does not have to make extravagant claims for Liberman as some kind of closet daemon of art history in order to note that his exclusion from the official version of recent American painting is an error. Perhaps, after this admirable small show, a retrospective may come to put him in focus∙Robert Hughes