Word: ops
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...look on him as a parvenu from the prairies. Living in grandiose isolation at either end of an axis that stretches from the Pedernales to the Potomac, Johnson is a stranger to the put-downs and hang-ups (terms he would probably not comprehend) of a populace that digs op and pop art, Valleys of Dolls in paperback and microskirts in the front office...
...very diversity indicates a vigorous painting scene across the U.S. And the multiple styles should decisively demolish the notion that trend setting stops or starts at the Hudson. For better or for worse, New York and the provinces are neck and neck when it comes to whipping up frothy op and pop confections. And as for styles so new that no handy handle has as yet been hung on them, they are almost as likely to be committed to canvas in Chicago as in New York...
Abstraction is the dominant mode in the U.S. right now and accounts for approximately 50% of the paintings at the Whitney. How varied nonobjectiveness can be is illustrated by the op grids of Cleveland's Julian Stanczak as well as by the empty canvas of Manhattan Minimalist Robert Mangold, and the sheet of lacquered aluminum from Los Angeles' Billy Al Bengston (representative of what one Whitney curator dubbed California's "finish fetish"). But abstraction as an end in itself is on the wane. Artists everywhere are tending to combine it with figurative elements, or give their abstractions...
Thus the San Francisco Opera last week gave Gunther Schuller's first op era. The Visitation, the kind of production it has always needed and never had. The Hamburg State Opera, which commissioned the work, performed it successfully last year (TIME, Oct. 21, 1966). Yet when the Hamburgers brought their production to New York City last summer, American audiences booed nearly as much as they applauded. Partly they were disappointed by its literal realism, which seemed at odds with Schuller's Kafka-inspired libretto and feverishly atonal score...
...constantly compromised by the nature of his work and the demands of personal and professional survival, he labors not to change a world or any corner of it, but to preserve something of his own integrity and decency. Lew Archer is a natural successor to Hammett's jaded Continental Op and Chandler's cynical knight-errant, Philip Marlowe, but his problems and solutions are far closer to us and the business of living...